Adobe's Scott Belsky on how NFTs will change creativity

Adobe is one of those companies that I don't think we pay enough attention to -- it's been around since 1982, and the entire creative economy runs through its software. You don't just edit a photo, you Photoshop it. Premiere Pro and After Effects are industry-standard video production tools. Pro photographers all depend on Lightroom. We spend a lot of time on Decoder talking about the creator economy, but creators themselves spend all their time working in Adobe's tools. Adobe is in the middle of announcing new features for all those tools this week -- at its annual conference, Adobe Max. On this episode, I'm talking to Scott Belsky, chief product officer at Adobe, about the new features coming to Adobe's products, many of which focus on collaboration, and about creativity broadly -- who gets to be a creative, where they might work, and how they get paid. Scott is a big proponent of NFTs -- non-fungible tokens. You've probably heard about NFTs, but the quick version is that they allow people to buy and sell digital artwork and keep records of that ownership in a public blockchain. The idea is to create scarcity for digital goods, just like physical products -- to definitively say you own a digital piece of art, just like you own a physical piece of art. Of course, the internet is a giant copy machine, so it's a little more complicated than that -- but a lot of people, including Scott, think it's a revolution. In fact, Photoshop itself will be able to prepare an image to be an NFT very soon. I'm a little more skeptical -- so we got into it. Scott and I talk about all that. And we squeezed it into just about an hour. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. It's been a while since we've talked, I've always enjoyed our conversations. We have a lot to talk about. This episode of the podcast is coming out alongside Adobe Max, your big conference, and you're announcing a ton of new products there, including big features for Creative Cloud on the web. You're very bullish on NFTs, which I really want to talk to you about, and I have some big questions about the future of computing. I was looking at these topics and I was like, "Man, I need like two hours." But we're going to try to get it all in. Let's do it, a power hour. But I want to start with what I have come to think of as the Decoder questions; the basics of how Adobe as a company works. I think Adobe, as a company, we take for granted in the best way. The products are ubiquitous, they're famous, entire industries depend on them. But I feel like it's a company we don't know a lot about.