Thomas Carlyle

In five years, super hard to tell, 60 months from now, what's the world going to look like with superintelligence? And certainly beyond that, even tougher.

But I think as analysts, business people, investors, we can absolutely think about, okay, well, what's going to be happening in the next year? What's going to be happening in the next three years? And let's really focus in on, okay, over the next 12 months, as Thomas Carlyle said, it's not what's dimly in the distance, but what's straight in front of us to focus on here.

So that's where we're going to focus on next 12 months, next 36 months.

How does Amazon position itself well? And it's already done a lot of that, but how does it continue to grow that advantage that it has? How does it continue to build out this infrastructure, both on the retail side, on the AWS side? and continue to monetize on the advertising side.

Another thing I would say in proving the will of God, it is by doing the will of God today, right now.

Thomas Carlyle said, our main business is not to see what lies dimly in the distance, but to do what clearly lies at hand.

The will of God is not so much what I'm going to do five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, but what am I going to do today? Will you trust God's will today and trust Him for every tomorrow? You say, I can't see clearly.

I don't know exactly which turn.

the working class autodidact movement, these guys who were working in mines, in mills, in factories, in some of the worst jobs that have ever been created for human beings in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution.

They were coming home from brutalizing work and they were going to the Mining Education Institute or they were going to the library, or they were sitting down and they were reading Thomas Carlyle or Edward Gibbon or Tennyson or teaching themselves Latin and living this unbelievably rich life.

life in books, even while they were doing these appallingly difficult jobs.

And, you know, that's not the universal story of working class reading, but it's a part of it that I think is often overlooked and often forgotten and is a testament to how deep the culture of literacy once went in our society.

But it wasn't just the Irish, it was the Scots as well.

Historian Thomas Carlyle saw the disaster coming too, because people didn't see the danger they were in, number one, for rejecting Christ, and number two, for listening to clowns like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who's considered the intellectual architect of the French Revolution.

Carlyle wrote this, There was once a man called Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas.

The second edition was bound in the skins of those who laughed at the first.

Ouch, that hit hard.