What's obtuse about it? It's honestly a very straightforward statement. Every thing we think or say is a function of past events. We don't incorporate future events into what we think or say. Even speculation or imagination of future events occurred in the past (that is the act of imagining it occurred in the past).

It's really a super simple concept -- maybe it's so simple that it seems obtuse.

Because the other poster's point wasn't that it was a 'past event.' The point was that it's just predicting based upon the previous token. It's disingenuous to mix the two concepts up.