the specialization argument
The framing Hockey uses is specific enough to be useful: find the most boring thing you can find interesting, and find it interesting over a multi-decade period. Not AI, not geopolitics, not the topics that circulate on podcasts and make people feel smart across a broad range of things. Those spaces are crowded with capable people. The value is in the niche that most people find too dull to go deep on.
He reads 2,000-page books on 19th century Chinese banking history. On banks in 1800s Japan. The yield from that kind of reading is usually one small insight per book — a detail about how correspondent banking worked, or how a particular settlement mechanism was designed, or how a crisis propagated through a network. That detail only creates value if it sits on top of decades of domain knowledge where the leverage is high enough for one insight to matter at scale. Most people won't do that reading. That's the point.
The contrast he draws is between mass-market interesting topics and genuinely boring niches. AI is mass-market interesting. Everyone has opinions. The smart people are dense in that space. The boring niche — the one that requires reading things your partner gives you genuine grief for reading — is not crowded. The competition is thinner. The leverage on a single insight is higher because fewer people have the context to extract it.
There's a version of this that applies to any domain where the information is public and the constraint is patience. The people who understand the history of staking economics well enough to see what 2022 implied about chain sustainability were not reading anything that wasn't available to everyone. They just sat with it long enough. The people who understood how correspondent banking worked in the 19th century were not accessing privileged information. They were doing the reading nobody else wanted to do.
What makes this actually hard is that the boring thing has to stay interesting to you specifically over years. Hockey says he's probably the best in the world at a small number of things that are genuinely hard to explain in a podcast. That's not false modesty — it's a description of what deep specialization looks like from the outside. The thing you know most deeply is often the hardest to communicate to someone who doesn't share the foundational years of context. The depth that creates leverage is also the depth that makes you sound boring at dinner.