this message comes from ms now ai is moving fast what's real what's hype and where is it all headed on why is this happening chris hayes talks with leading experts to make sense of it the ai end game a special series from ms now listen wherever you get your podcasts this is planet money from the day that stewart simple decided to become an artist he was eight years old his mom took him to a museum in london and from across the floor of the gallery he saw this beacon of yellow you've never seen color like that before the painting was sunflowers by van goh they just knocked me sideways and i was literally shaking and i think it was the colors that were doing it to me those colors are what inspired stewart to become an artist these days he makes giant installation pieces with bright yellow smiley faces made of steel or he does these pop art collages with lots of neon colors stewart often designs his art on the computer which is why it was a big deal two years ago when all his colors disappeared one day i switched my laptop on and all the colors in the files are black all the colors are gone and who had taken the colors a company called pantone you see pantone owns the color palette that a lot of people use in programs like say adobe photoshop or illustrator the way to think about pantone is a language so if i say cat to you you can picture a cat so if i say 249c you can open your book and look up 249c and i can open my book and look up 249c we're talking the same language we're talking exactly the same color pantone books and pantone color palettes are the industry standard for how designers pretty much anywhere talk about color like if we wanted to make a bunch of planet money frisbees we would tell the manufacturer we want those frisbees to be green number 348c and it's pantone that created and owns that entire system of colors but on that day two years ago when stewart's designs were all turned black pantone had decided that if people wanted to use pantone colors in adobe photoshop and illustrator they'd have to start paying a monthly or annual fee until then all the colors in their artwork and their designs and their projects would be gone it's a huge thing and it's not just me like this is this is like a global problem that is not right now pantone is this giant in the industry and stewart is just one artist but he wasn't just gonna sit back and do nothing stewart decides i've got to do something about this this is just wrong he's gonna mount a rescue mission he's gonna rescue the colors hello and welcome to planet money i'm sam yellow horse kessler and i'm jock woe stewart was going up against the pantone monopoly pantone created the standard for how people talk about color a standard that for pantone has become incredibly lurid today on the show how does an industry standard become the standard how did pantone come to control the language of the rainbow and how did pantone amass so much power that they could one day turn all the colors black this message comes from ms now ai is moving fast what's real what's hype and where is it all headed on why is this happening chris hayes talks with leading experts to make sense of it the ai end game a special series from ms now listen wherever you get your podcasts the modern world could not function without standards a bunch of people or companies deciding okay this is what a usbc plug looks like or this is the shape of a light bulb socket or this bunch of dots and dashes will be the sign in morse code for sors but the thing about standards is they only work if everyone is on the same standard which kind of becomes this chicken or egg question right how you make a standard into a standard the story of how pantone became a standard starts with one man about 60 years ago nice man uh but a tough man this is richard herbert he's talking about his dad larry the inventor of the pantone standard he's always used the saying takes a tough man to make a tender chicken so it takes a tough man to make an accurate color now we did reach out to larry for this episode but he wasn't available richard though worked at pantone for decades he eventually became the president of the company and richard tells us that back in the 1960s his dad larry worked at a printing company making brochures and signs and posters and he noticed this issue it was really hard for people to talk about color if some client wanted a certain shade of blue for their poster or magazine ad they'd have to actually send a sample of color you know our famous thing was cut a piece off their tie and send it into the print and say match this color and then every time they had to match that color it would be custom mixing they had their own ink formula books and they could get close but it was very random and not just ties people would hand larry the wildest of references like here's a piece of a vase can you match that color or maybe this leaf from my backyard i have heard anecdotally of people bringing in a dog you know match my dog you know i want this brochure to be the color of fido yeah exactly all this made larry's job pretty chaotic right this little scrap of a tie might get faded might get lost the dog might get lost yeah now some printing companies and ink manufacturers had what are called color reference books with catalogs of different colors and how to mix them but every color book had a different set of shades and used different formulas larry wanted designers to be able to go to any print shop and get the exact same color he wanted to make a set of shades that everybody could use a universal language for color a standard the purpose of a standard of course is to help different parts of industry all work together think of like a shipping container shipping containers mostly come in a standard size and shape and now the whole supply chain is designed around those standard size shipping containers from the cargo ships to the cranes to the ports to the trucks and now a lot of times standards are created by the government or by a group of companies working together but people and companies have also famously fought over whose standards would win out think like vhs versus betamax but in the case of pantone larry was just one guy how did he get a standard to succeed two things first he made a really thoughtful standard he researched which colors were the most commonly used and he narrowed the list down to about 500 and for each of those colors he developed an ink recipe for how to reproduce that color consistently there would be a number back in those days it was called pms for pantone matching system uh pms a number and underneath an ink formula but what's even more important than coming up with a good standard is to really go out and sell your standard and here is where larry had a clever strategy he started with the ink manufacturers but he knew that the big ones weren't going to give him the time of day so he targeted the smaller ones the mom and pop ink shops you know i think he knew enough that let me work with the small guys that i'm used to working with that i was buying ink from anyway and uh you know he knew the community so it was a better way to start low hanging fruit you know pretty soon larry gets 20 of those 21 smaller ink manufacturers on board with his pantone color standard and from there it just kind of snowballed because you see standards benefit from what are called network effects the more people in the industry who started to use pantone's way of talking about color the more people who wanted to use pantone's way of talking about color once he got a certain amount of u.s ink makers on board then he hopped on the plane and he started in europe and met with the companies there and did the same thing and got them to sign on and continue to i guess on to the middle east and then to asia and then back and because larry was one of the first people to try to standardize this industry he was quickly able to get everybody around the world to use his system by 1968 he succeeded he turned pantone into an industry standard and this is when larry and the pantone color system faced its biggest test copycats now if you think about other standards like say the metric system no one owns the metric system a lot of standards are open like that they're free to use but in pantone's case larry always insisted that his company pantone owned this standard so when he noticed another company selling copycat books he took them to court these knockoff pantone books were called paritone they didn't even try to make it look different the lawsuit was about whether pantone could own the standard it had created whether it could copyright the colors and codes in the pantone system paritone's argument at least one of them was that nobody can copyright colors colors are a natural phenomenon one company can't own the rainbow pantone though said what it made was more like a dictionary or a novel you can't copyright a word but when you organize words in a specific way it tells a story and a unique story the same is true with color you can't copyright a color but you know if you create this arrangement of colors that creates a system that's protectable and that's copyrightable and the judge in this lawsuit sided with pantone the judge said pantone was not copywriting or trying to own the rainbow they created a system they created a standard and that was really just the watershed moment that just said okay we have a court tested copyright on the system and don't mess with us since that lawsuit in 1968 pantone has basically had a monopoly on how companies talk about color a monopoly that has proven to be very lucrative after the brick how pantone makes money off its sand and what happens when one person tries to go up against the pantone monopoly this message comes from ms now ai is moving fast what's real what's hype and where is it all headed on why is this happening chris hayes talks with leading experts to make sense of it the ai end game a special series from ms now listen wherever you get your podcasts hey darren woods here the company nvidia dominates the ai chip market its success comes from designing computer chips and a software ecosystem thousands of people over decades there have been building middleware to enable ai developers to use the hardware and that is all proprietary to nvidia in our latest bonus episode is my extended conversation with david rosenthal the co-host of the acquired podcast we talk about nvidia's ceo jensen huang and how the company went from video game graphics cards to ai juggernaut that's for planet money plus listeners and if that's you thanks if it's not it could be you can get sponsor free listening and support the work of planet money just go to plus.nbr.org okay so it has been about 60 years since larry herbert first created the pantone color standard and let us just show you how important this has become to the day-to-day workings of the real world we are in an industrial part of queens new york walking into what's called a die house this is christian drinkwater owner of this place that you know dyes fabric for customers like halton klein mark jacobs bierre wang big big fashion houses and this die house imagine an industrial lawn with what looked like washing machines agitating clothes back and forth with different colored dyes so the reason we're here is because for people in the fashion industry like christian pantone has become invaluable it lets people quickly take an idea like color and get on the same page so for example christian told us one of his clients disney recently ordered a bunch of felt fabric dyed a specific salmon color maybe for like a piglet costume now disney could say just watch a lady the pooh movie and pause it on piglet and then match that color but what if christian happens to pause the movie when piglet is in shadow or what if christian's screen has different color settings this is where the pantone standard comes in they can just send me an email that says we want this to match pantone 15-166 and i can reference my book and we're looking at the same exact thing so these days almost every brand you can think of talks about themselves in the language that pantone invented take target's red bullseye logo that is pantone 186 netflix is red though that's pantone 1795c but kodak red that is pantone 485c and each of these reds refers to a specific code that you can look up in the pantone books and color palettes right you know how like there used to be this official kilogram that sat in a vault in paris and this was the one kilogram to rule all the kilograms these pantone books are like that they are the definitive authority on what any of these colors look like we wanted to be in the presence of one of these books to hold it in our hand you have a book here yeah we have several christian grabs a couple books off a messy shelf this one i haven't used in a long time oh wow these pantone books are thick binders full of thousands of these little bad swatches each the size of a stamp these are physical cotton chips you see like this is to color and doesn't become subjective and this is what i reference to the most these books they're like seeing that official kilogram in person but unlike the official kilogram this book this color standard is controlled by a corporation trying to make money and the main way they make money is by selling these books the books that christian uses cost three thousand dollars brand new this is this is even a different book bigger fancier versions like the ones that include a set of plastic chips those go for nine thousand dollars it is a lot to keep having to buy new ones all the time see it's not enough to just buy a set once pantone says the colors will fade over time and they're always adding new colors new codes but christian says you can't run a color business without the pantone colors and pantone it's expanded its business beyond just physical books and swatches they also make digital palettes a lot of designers use those palettes in programs like adobe photoshop and illustrator and it's those digital palettes that became the center of the drama that day back in 2022 when artists around the world discovered that their designs had all turned black like with the artists who had sample experience at the beginning of the story one day i switch my laptop on and all the colors in the files are black all the colors are gone for years and years adobe have been paying pantone for the right to use pantone's digital color palettes and its software but that deal ended in 2022 which is when everybody's pantone colors and adobe files started to go black so pantone went directly to users and said if you want your colors back you have to pay 15 a month going forward now some people blamed adobe for this but for stewart this was an ugly reminder of just how much power pantone wielded because it owned the standard and it could turn it off whenever stewart decides he's going to liberate pantone's digital color palette what do you do well here's the funny thing i um i go that's right i um i created a color palette of my own that was extremely similar to theirs uh-huh why did you have to word that so carefully there's just certain things that could probably get me in trouble yeah stewart basically just made a free copy of pantone's palette he calls his version freetone it's this file that has pantone's colors and codes and when you add it as a plug into adobe suddenly your colors are back same as before stewart says freetone was immediately popular it's been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and stewart does know that what he's doing is legally iffy but to him it's almost like an act of civil disobedience has anyone from pantone ever reached out to you about this no it's really weird i've heard nothing from pantone at all no not one thing stewart says you'd actually welcome the opportunity to go to court to stand up there and ask is it fair for pantone to hold a monopoly on the language of color this is the question at the heart of the story if you look at the standards that are out there in the world a lot are overseen by a government or a non-profit organization for instance a non-profit minute is the standard for usb plugs the u.s government created the original standard for how color tv was broadcast over the air has any of this ever made you think well maybe we should not use pantone anymore maybe we should you know get together and come up with something a standard for color that's open that's free that is you know owned by all of us and not just one company yeah i mean that's a beautiful idea and it's certainly something i've entertained but um to produce something like that you need two things you need massive option it's no good having a language if you're the only person in the world who speaks it um and also the cost of the infrastructure of implementing something like that um it's massive i can't create a whole new color standard and get everyone in the world to use it the whole pantone saga it raises a lot of questions about the economics of standards on one side standards are incredibly valuable they create efficiency and consistency when pantone invented this common language for color there's no longer need to cut up ties or walk fido to the print shop and creating that standard took a lot of work it required research testing selling it to countries around the world all that labor is what allowed pantone to make an entire industry out of color but on the other hand the way that standards work is that they are monopolies they kind of have to be a standard is only valuable when everybody uses it but things can get messy when a single company like hence When we spoke with Richard Herbert, the former president of Pantone and the son of the man who created the Pantone color system, we did ask him what he thought about this criticism that Pantone wields its monopoly power in an unfair way. The reality is you don't have to use Pantone. You can use whatever system works the best. And, you know, you talk about a standard.
Pantone became a de facto standard because it worked the best. But it's also true that when everybody else in your industry adopts a standard like Pantone, you kind of have to use that standard too. By the way, we did reach out to Adobe for the story. Adobe eventually made it possible for those blacked out files to show up in color again.
But they're not official Pantone colors. Now, Pantone is not just the owner of this color standard. They also have all these side hustles. They work with big brands to create custom colors.
Like the Minions movie, Antone created Minion Yellow. Yeah, and actually when we began reporting the story, I actually had this dream for Pantone to have one of those colors. For Pantone to have our own spot on the Pantone system. Maybe even right next to the man.
Right where we belong. Yeah, so we asked Pantone, and after three months, there's still been no word. So the other day, we asked someone else who knows a thing or two about colors. We were wondering if you might consider making us a color.
I'd love to make you a color. It'd be really fun. Yeah, of course. Oh, great.
Awesome. Stuart isn't just the creator of that digital color palette, Freetone. We also have a whole line of paints and pigments. So we're working with Stuart to get a Pantone color make.
The question is now, what color? Aren't we in like a solid green territory? The planet is mostly blue. Ocean is gold.
I'm thinking gold. Listeners, send us your ideas. There's a link to a survey in the show notes. Gray?
Should we pick gray? Is gray a good color? Kenny, I should say, is colorblind. That might be relevant.
Yeah, I don't know why I'm in this meeting. This episode was produced by Willa Rubin, with help from James Sneak. It was edited by Jess Jang and back-checked by Sarah Fuades. Engineering by Debbie Daughery, with help from Carl Kraft.
Alex Goldmark is Pantone's executive producer. Special thanks as well to Mary Claire Peet, Peter Hayden, Kelly James, Stan Johnston, Avery Truffleman, Lori Pressman, Hilary Tamor, and Joby Rosen. I'm Samuel Overs-Kessler. And I'm Jeff Woe.
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