[Following a brief description of his very successful career] But if you listened very carefully, you would have heard two words over and over again: “lucky” and “given.” Those are two very very dangerous words for a comedian. Those two words can put you to sleep, especially once you get a taste of both being “lucky” and being “given.” The days about luck and being given are about to end. They’re about to go away.

Not totally. There are always comedians who will work hard and get noticed by agents and managers and record labels. There will always be an element of that. And they deserve their success. And there’s always going to be people who benefit from that.

What I mean is: Not being lucky and not being given are no longer going to define your career as a comedian and as an artist.

You guys need to stop thinking like gatekeepers. You need to do it for the sake of your own survival.

Because all of us comedians after watching Louis CK revolutionize sitcoms and comedy recordings and live tours. And listening to "WTF With Marc Maron" and "Comedy Bang! Bang!" and watching the growth of the UCB Theatre on two coasts and seeing careers being made on Twitter and Youtube.

Our careers don’t hinge on somebody in a plush office deciding to aim a little luck in our direction. There are no gates. They’re gone. The model for success as a comedian in the '70s and '80s? That was middle school.

We can just walk away.

You know why we can do that now? Because of these. (Oswalt holds up an iPhone)

In my hand right now I’m holding more filmmaking technology than Orson Welles had when he filmed Citizen Kane.

I’m holding almost the same amount of cinematography, post-editing, sound editing, and broadcast capabilities as you have at your tv network.

In a couple of years it’s going to be fucking equal. I see what’s fucking coming. This isn’t a threat, this is an offer.

As the record industry moved through this stage there was a decline in learning orientation -- in learning what fans actually wanted -- both in terms of how they consumed music and what they were willing to pay for. So to, they began to discount the role that luck played in their success, to assume that the mass-marketing successes that occurred near the end the CD boom, which sold 3-4 million copies, applied to the natural laws of the universe, rather than that of a relatively short-lived phenomenon. This addiction to blockbuster artists is what characterizes the second stage of decline, which Collin's deemed The Undisciplined Pursuit of More. Here, the record industry started out on an unsustainable quest, and, because of their huge successes, they were pressured to grow.

Having reached the peak of the CD boom in 1999, the record industry had become a nearly $15-billion-a-year juggernaut, but under the pressure for more growth they collapsed, and, in the process, a vicious cycle of expectations had been set that strained the artists, the fans, the culture, and their systems to the point of breaking. Since record industry was unable to deliver new music with "consistent tactical excellence," they began to fray at the edges. Disruptive technologies were released, an epidemic of file-sharing proceeded, and, at this critical juncture, vested interests of music executives struggled and competed to achieve repetitive consumption through obsolescence. But these executives were too late, as the record industry, by externalizing the blame for their decline in sales, had already started to show symptoms of stage three, Denial of Risk and Peril.

Music executives began discounting negative data, amplifying positive data, and putting a positive spin on ambiguous data. In stage three, Collin's argues that those in power start to blame external factors for setbacks -- "or otherwise explain away the data" -- rather than accepting responsibility and confronting "the frightening reality that their enterprise may be in serious trouble." Right away, the Internet and file-sharing became easy scapegoats for the decline in sales that the record industry faced.