Mark Fuller | Designing Magnets for Human Connection Through Creativity

Srini Rao

Mark, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Mark Fuller

Well, it's such a treat to be here. Thank you for having me.

Srini Rao

It is my pleasure to have you here. So I found out about you by way of your publicist. And when I saw the words, the guy who designed the fountains of the Bellagio, I was like, what? I'm like, that is a spectacle of epic proportions. Whoever can create something like that as somebody I have to talk to. Uh, but before we get into all that, uh, I want to just start by asking you, what is one of the most important things that you learned from one or both of your parents that have influenced and shaped who you've become and what you've ended up doing with your life?

Mark Fuller

You know, it was probably by example, hard work. My dad is a recession child. He wanted to be a writer, very good writer. Got a number of stories published, was part way through a book, and then the recession came and he had a big family quit and had to work and he would, late at night, I'd hear the old, you know, the old royal typewriter down in the den clicking away, but dad would, and he was a great dad, he would wanna play.

catch with me in the weekends and all that stuff. But then he'd go back in, have dinner, and he'd be at his desk doing work. And my mom worked for the FBI up until two weeks, or three weeks or something, I guess, before I was born. There weren't female agents in those days, and there weren't cell phones either. So she was on the other end of a landline, and the agents, if they were on a hot case, had to call in every hour. So somebody knew they weren't shot or whatever. And she worked the Bugsy Malone case with the agents in the field and she on the inside.

That's some hard work too.

Srini Rao

Yeah. What advice did they give you about potential career paths? Because I mean, what you do for a living is not something that anybody would pick out of a, you know, high school guidance counselor's list of recommendations. I mean, which is pretty much like anybody I've interviewed. It's not, you know, a career that you end up in by choice. It seems like almost accidental.

Mark Fuller

You know, the answer to that is they didn't push me into anything, but whatever I wanted to do, and a few of the possible choices along the way were a bit on the crazy side. They were just 100% supportive. And I was one of those kids, and you know how many people you ask today, even young people in their, I don't know, upper teens, what do you want to be when you grow up and you get a lot of, gee, I don't know's or, I don't know, I guess I'll go into business, which if I don't have a s-

super love for hiring MBAs because I figured that was typically the default category for people never knew what they wanted to do when they grew up. That's rude, but I'll say it anyway. But I can remember when I was little going to the kids library and I fell in love with Roy Chapman Andrews who was a paleontologist who discovered the first dinosaur egg in the Gobi Desert. And then I fell in love with spelunking and thought I wanted to be a cave explorer all my life. Then I wanted to be a chemist. And-

Srini Rao

too.

Mark Fuller

But it always came back to it to kind of circle around something. When we were nine, we went to Disneyland for the first time. Now this is a drive across the desert, no divided freeway or anything, because this would have been the early 60s, from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. We would leave with no air conditioning in our second or third hand car. We'd leave about four in the morning to get past the worst of the desert heat. And we pulled up at Disneyland and we walked through that gate. And I was nine, I thought.

If you can't be God, literally, being Walt Disney, or at least working for him, and creating you know, magical lands and places and experiences has got to be it. So I always circled back to that and of course I did that, spent five or six years working there, which I was lucky to do.

Srini Rao

Well, I mean, I think that what is striking to me about this story is that you had this sort of moment when you were really young. And I think a lot of people have those, but most people don't recognize them for what they are and often do nothing with them. Why do you think that you had the foresight to see that there's something just magical about what you what you saw here and that would shape what you wanted to do with your life?

Mark Fuller

I think I was born gifted with an intense sense of curiosity. And that is such a driver. So I would watch Don Herbert, who was Mr. Wizard or something on Saturday morning TV, and I'd get really interested in that. And then I'd, in those days you could buy some rather dangerous chemicals in the kids' chemistry set. And so I just want to find out about that. And then, let me turn the clock back for you.

when I went to the University of Utah, which is as a state resident, wonderful, wonderful campus, big campus, tuition was I think $145 a quarter. So even though we were on the poor side, it was no rush to get through college, because you couldn't afford the tuition. So my degree in civil engineering, which is a four year degree, I took five and a half years to complete, not because I was on the dumb side, but because I fell in love with

Srini Rao

Wow.

Mark Fuller

other disciplines I took. As a civil engineer you have to take three quarters of physics. I took twelve and some of them were in optics and it was just fascinating I thought. And then that was the time when the original television version of Mission Impossible came out and they would do, do you remember the latex masks and the disguises and all that great stuff? And so I just went, waltzed into the theater department. I found the professor there who

lighting design and stage makeup, Bill Barber. It turns out, and I took classes from him as a civil engineer, it turns out he would disappear every once in a while for a few weeks because he was employed by the CIA to help disguise their agents. He was a very interesting guy. But those are the crazy things you find if you don't tether yourself to racing through school. My son's in college now, my daughter will begin in a year. And when we go through these orientations, one of the...

recurring themes, maybe it's the high cost of tuition, but the counselors will say, well, if you really focus, you might get your degree in three and a half years. And we've told our kids, take, I mean, don't waste it, but it's an opportunity to try things, to learn things. Take, you know, take five years or a little more and stuff way out of your, out of your presumed major.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it's funny because I've talked to numerous people about this and you know the way our education system socializes as is to commit to a path and it actually discourages curiosity and exploration. It's kind of in a lot of ways like a fast food menu. It's like here are the majors you could choose here are the potential career paths that you know they might lead to and you know people are kind of forced into boxes so early in their lives. I mean, I

You know when I went to go speak to my high school AP English teachers class after I got my book deal I was amazed at how worried they were about what they planned to do with their lives I'm like you haven't even left high school yet granted. I know this all too well because that's what I was like at 20 Why do you think that is? I mean and if you know as somebody who had this experience of really you know taking a more exploratory approach to college What would you change and how would we go about doing that more importantly?

Mark Fuller

Thanks for watching.

Mark Fuller

Well, that's such a great question, particularly now since, and I'm, you can tell I'm a big proponent of education, I've been, I'm tossing in my mind the current administration's plan for a lot more preschool, and I'm thinking, is that good, or will that, I mean, you have to almost audition to get in a good preschool, and then most of those two years are spent preparing you to get into a school with a good kindergarten.

Srini Rao

Ha ha ha!

Mark Fuller

And that's spent preparing you to get into a great middle school, which is spent preparing you to get into a fabulous high school, which is, I don't have to finish that paragraph, right? And then, and then I guess it's all just, if you really just run that out, it's just preparing you to get buried at a fabulous funeral home, right? I mean, where does that stop? Where can you start living in the present instead of preparing for the next stage? That's such a waste of time. I don't mean it's a waste of time to be active and learning. But if you're focused on tomorrow, you don't even notice today.

Srini Rao

Yeah, and you know, it's funny because I think for young people, especially ambitious ones, you know, I went to what is arguably an elite school, which is Berkeley. I mean, it's not Harvard or Stanford or Yale. But in environments like that, people are incredibly future oriented. They really don't. And I know this because that was me. And so I guess the thing I wonder, I mean, based on your experience, the fact that you have kids, what would you say to parents who are listening to this?

Mark Fuller

Well, great.

Mark Fuller

Yeah.

Srini Rao

encouraging exploration and curiosity in their kids.

Mark Fuller

Well, I was trying to make a point to some younger people the other day about, and there was talk about, well, do I really want to get them into PhD? And you know, that's great, but it's sort of like, well, the classic saying is you learn more and more about less and less until you know absolutely everything about absolutely nothing. But I was, we were walking along and I was looking down at the sidewalk and there were some cracks between the pieces of concrete and the stones nearby, and I said, let's look for life. Look down at your feet.

Srini Rao

Ha ha ha!

Mark Fuller

where do you see a little blade of grass or a little dandelion or something sprouting up? Not out of the middle of a big old block of granite or cement, but where those two, maybe a stone is butting up against a tree root or something. And I tried to spin that into the metaphor of the most interesting stuff in new life comes when two dissimilar objects or fields of study or human beings bump into each other.

And one of the really fun things about WET for me, I say, if you're ever out and have a time to come by sometime, I'd love to show you through. But we have a super fun campus and we don't, discipline wise, we don't have a lot of anybody, but by golly, we've got one of just about everybody. I mean, we've got, you know, textile designers, optical engineers, firmware developers, painters, illustrators, dance choreographers. I mean, you could...

thumb through, well in my day, thumb through the physical college catalog today, scan it online. And I mean, we've had, I don't think we have an astronaut at the moment. We've got an Academy Award winner, a So You Think You Can Dance winner. I mean, when we're doing fountain design, you go figure out how that comes together. But it does. You know, I always like to refer to Steve Jobs' fabulous commencement talk.

Srini Rao

Yeah

Mark Fuller

where he reminds everybody that he was a computer guy, but he stuck his nose into a calligraphy class and decided to just sneak in and audit it. And that later became the genesis for the whole, you know, beautiful written form of script on the Mac instead of the typewriter, he kind of monospaced lettering. And I spoke to a group of engineering students earlier this week, came by for tour, and I said, anything that interests you.

learn it, throw yourself into it. Don't have somebody say, well, what does that have to do with your major? I can make, I made them all a promise that whatever they learn, they will use at some point in their life. And that may be the thing that distinguishes them from the folks who just followed the yellow brick road.

Srini Rao

It's funny you say that because I have an econ degree and I thought what a useless degree, I'm never gonna use this. I still to this day remember sitting in final class at Berkeley, it was environmental economics and I'm sitting here listening to this guy talk to me about how to use a utility function to maximize the amount of milk that I can get out of a cow. And I'm thinking when the hell is this ever gonna matter? And then I went back and I read The Wealth of Nations recently and it was

Mark Fuller

Mmm.

Srini Rao

one of the things where I started to just see my business through that lens and I realized I was like, oh wow, that degree actually came back full circle, but it took almost 20 years.

Mark Fuller

Sure.

Yeah, yeah. What's the what's the series of books? Or thinkonomics is something crazy nomics and it's written by a couple of economists who just analyze the darndest things you know, through that economic lens. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So absolutely. It's just it's a different camera lens to look at life through and you see very differently. It's like looking, I guess looking with an infrared lens or something that is not visible light at a subject we're used to seeing in our RGB.

Srini Rao

for economics.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, I mean, speaking of looking at the world through different lenses, you know, the average civil engineer doesn't become a fountain designer. They usually are, you know, building bridges. How in the world do you get from studying civil engineering to designing fountains?

Mark Fuller

Well, if I may, I'll take two little short snippets along the way. There was a bit of, what did you call it, method to my madness. See, when I was, I mean, I'm not a genius by any stroke. I just tell everybody I work really hard. But so I'm in civil engineering, and so I've got a pretty good technical mind, pretty good background. But when we had to give class presentations, oh my gosh, are they boring? Because engineers don't.

really into standing up, they're scared to be in front of people or what have you. And then I was taking these classes over in theater, and over there, of course, it's all about being on stage and presenting, but gosh, they couldn't build the simplest prop in the world and have it not fall apart. So I could have been a relatively, I hate to use the word mediocre, let's say mediocre plus engineer and been a superhero in all my theater classes, and I could have made kick-ass presentations, not only could but did.

presentations in engineering because of my theater background. So sometimes it's good, you know, to step across the border and enjoy the fun of being there. Also a few, in those days, I hope it's sincerely improved, but in those days there were a little better dating choices in the theater department for an engineer than there were in his own field. Oh, but the story I was going to tell you about supporting parents. So.

Srini Rao

Hahahaha!

Mark Fuller

So mom and dad, and it wasn't a lot of costs. I lived at home and I went through the university there. And then I applied to a number of schools and a professor said, yeah, I really ought to think of Stanford. It's a very interesting school. So I applied and was accepted there, obviously in civil engineering. And so we're driving again across the desert. This time the Salt Flats going to Northern Cal. And I remember sitting, I can picture sitting, my dad was driving, mom was on the right side and I was sitting behind dad. And I took a deep breath and I said, dad?

I don't think I want to be a civil engineer. Now the tuition at Stanford was not $145 a quarter. You know, here we're going to deplete the family savings. He's, why? Why don't you want to do that? And I said, well, you know, if you're a civil engineer, basically your goal is to design and build things that do not move. I mean, bridges, you do not want them to move. Skyscrapers, you do not want them to move, right? As in tip over.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Mark Fuller

And I said, I like moving things. I like moving stuff. So I want to poke around when I get there. And I went and saw the Dean of Engineering when I got there and, and shared that story in a little more serious vein. And he said, what are your GREs? And I had a pretty good score. So he said, oh, you can be whatever you want. So I went into mechanical engineering and there was an orientation and the head of the mechanical engineering division said, well, we have three groups here. We have machine design, which I thought, well, that sounds like me.

And then we have the thermodynamics stuff, the heat and the energy and stuff. That's amazing, but it wasn't my cup of tea. And he said, then we've got a third little group, and I don't even know how to describe them, so I'm gonna let Dr. McKim, who heads it up, describe it. It's called Product Design. And he said, we really don't claim them completely, because they're half in the College of Engineering and half in the College of Fine Arts. And I thought, boy, this sounds great. It was a two-year master's program instead of the one, so I had to break that.

double X snooze to my folks tuition wise. But there again, it was this cross fertilization. And I struggled because I didn't have a lot of art training with all my engineering studies. If you came through WET, you'd see it patterned on many of the things that I learned at Stanford in that bizarre program. One of the professors, Dr. Fadiman, he was on loan to the engineering school, but he was from the Department of Psychology.

We just had crazy professors from all over campus come in and kind of stir the pot. And it was, the whole program was about being creative, inventive, and stepping across the line. And so, and then I went to Disney, and at that time particularly, I mean Walt Disney was no longer with us, but I got to work with most of his peers, who were still there, a rich, creative bunch. So I've been very blessed with the experiences I've had. I think I just keep my eyes open for him.

I mean, I do that at least and try to step into those calligraphy rooms that Steve Jobs peeked into when I see one with the door cracked open.

Srini Rao

Yeah. So how do you get from Disney to wet? I mean, I am so fascinated by the work that people do with water in particular. As a ten-year surfer, I have this just immense love for anything water. And I still to this day remember the first time I saw the mountains at the Bellagio. And I remember sitting there, it was probably when I was in college, I was with my parents. And I'm like, you know what, dad? I was a freshman in college and I was like...

Mark Fuller

Thank you.

Srini Rao

I'm gonna be a billionaire and I'm gonna have whoever designed this design this in front of my house and he just looked at me and rolled his eyes. He's like, that's great. But I, to this day, like, it's just one of those things that, you know, like, I don't really like Vegas, but that is one of those most beautiful things I've ever seen. But, yeah, so I mean, how do you go from Disney to this? And then we'll then I really want to get into the actual creative process for how all this happens.

Mark Fuller

Yeah.

Mark Fuller

Well, thank you for saying that. I will say one thing. There are, I'm sure, shorter, faster, better ways to getting to be a billionaire than going into the found business. I always like to play with water as a kid. Dad built, for my brother and I, a really cool sandbox behind the garage. And I, first thing I did was screw two garden hoses together so they'd reach and flood it, you know, and then build sand dams and, which I guess little of my

Srini Rao

Ha ha ha!

Mark Fuller

pre-Civil Engineering coming up. And play in the snow and build, I remember building some kind of ice dams after big storms so that all the cars driving down the hill that we were, our house was near on the road would have to swerve out of the way of the big lake, I could damn. So there's something about water that's, fast, you know, has always been fascinating to me. And then in Civil Engineering, well, one of the reasons also took me a little longer. I was the first Civil Engineer in the history of the University of Utah to do that.

to go through the honors program, which is an accoutrement, I mean an add-on to any other degree, but it's intense liberal arts. And I thought, I don't know why somebody talked me into it. And a couple of great things came out of it, by the way. The classes, University of Utah, I don't know, probably in those days even 40,000 students or something. I don't, except for one chemistry class, I don't think I ever had a class my whole.

universities were more than like 15 people. I had a few classes of four, so I really, that made the experience really rich. Then I went to expensive Stanford and I was in huge classes a lot. But, but I had that honors program, but that required us to actually write and publish a written thesis, not for a master's degree, but for a baccalaureate degree. And so I say it was the first. I had a friend

who was also in the program and we did it together and we were trying to think of what to do for a thesis. We were sitting in the back of a fluid mechanics class and those days nothing on video, it was the old 16 millimeter click, you know, black and white films to show things. And the lesson was a little movie on something called laminar flow, which is if you take all the turbulence out of water, it's kind of like if you take all the turbulence out of light, you get a laser, all the little.

photons are moving the same, it's just being, you can sort of do the same thing with water. And Dave Ayer, my friend, wanted to become an architect and I wanted to go to Disney and we thought, what can we do? And the other kids were talking about thesis projects and sewage treatment plants, whatever, whatever. Let's see if we could scale that up to human size, architectural size, and make these clear streams of water. In the film, they're like matchstick size, right? They're like three inch high stream about the diameter of a toothpick.

Mark Fuller

And so we said about to do that and we did and the dad of a friend of my girlfriend at the time was building a little new apartment building and he gave us some money to actually build a model of our thesis project in the lobby which was super fun. So why am I telling all the old fountain so I have a thesis published on axis symmetric laminar fluid flow applied in an artistic or architectural installation.

And then when I went to Stanford and had to do a lot of different projects, I pursued that as one path. And then when I interviewed at Disney, tada, instead of just having a resume with classes and grades, well, I had a lot of projects because I'm a real project kid. But I showed that off and got hired in there.

Srini Rao

So what I wonder is, like I said, when I saw this for the first time, of course I didn't have the sort of creative insight that I do now from thousands of interviews, but just to understand what the hell goes into something this complex. I mean, like you mentioned, you have all these peoples because I think that has always been the thing now that I'm talking to you that has struck me about it, is you take something that is, you know,

basically a material and you humanize it in a way. You bring water to life. It's like, wow, these are, every section of that fountain, it's like, oh, there's a person dancing. Like you, the music, all of it. I mean, so start, which I realized is an insane question, but how does it even start? How do you conceive an idea this grand? And was it Steve Wynn coming to you and be like, yo, I need you to build this? Or how does it even begin?

Mark Fuller

Oh

Mark Fuller

Well, that one began, we had done some smaller projects as wet. I don't remember how many people we had, under probably 30 people or something, maybe in the company in those days. And Don Brinkerhoff was a very well known landscape architect, and had done Steve's properties. He'd done the landscaping around the Mirage Hotel and so forth. And I guess Steve told him, I want to build a big lake. I got this idea of doing kind of this Italian themed hotel called Bellagio.

And Steve was thinking of, oh maybe we'll put water skiers out front or whatever, but maybe I'd like to try a fountain. And Don says, well you gotta talk to Mark Fuller. I've done a couple projects with him. So Steve flew my wife and I up there. And we had a dinner and Steve is, I've learned a lot from him. He's amazing. He's very nearly blind from retinitis pigmentosa. Never complains about it at all. But so he's very visionary and he knows what.

will touch and appeal to people. And he said, Mark, he said, I want to do this big lake. And it has to be, when the people are there, they have to feel they're not in Las Vegas. We're not gonna do colored lights, we're not gonna do flashing, anything. It has to completely remove you from that experience. And he said, the other requirement is, I love music, because he was buddies with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack and just a bunch of people through his life.

It has to be integrally tied to music in a very sophisticated way. And thirdly, you have promised me it'll be the best and biggest thing you'll ever do in your life. You know, that's, that's an interesting promise to try to make somebody like Steve Lynn. Um, but, but he said, and, and he said, this is a big deal to me. It was three years before the hotel would open. And he said, I've never been really happy with the, the volcano in front of the

Srini Rao

Hahaha!

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Mark Fuller

you know, big rock thing with colored water squirting out of the top. So let's try getting to know each other. And why don't you take I don't know what he gives you or something and see what you can do that. So we redid that. We had a lot of fun. And then we built a big mock up here in our parking lot. And Steve and his family came down. I mean, we this is my theater. See prop building and set building. And Steve.

when we invited him down, he said, I was expecting to see something the size of a coffee table and you're gonna show me how the water looks like lava or something. No, this was as big as, I don't know what I wanna say, a two-story, two-stack garage or something all sculpted and then lit. And we're in Hollywood, right? So even then, a lot of my friends and stuff were scenic designers and we blew Steve away and he admitted that and that's a hard thing to do. I guess that's, if I'm gonna slip another piece of a.

advice into anybody who's listening. It's always, always try to really surprise the heck out of people by, you know, going, going further than even maybe you, you yourself expected it's first of all, it's just plain fun. And second of all, it guarantees you that your, your competition and see, I don't think of our competition as being other fountain companies because they all bunch of them copy, you know, one way or good or bad or not very much. So

what we've done in the past, but if you were to ask me, well, Mark, who's your biggest competitor? I would say the last project we did, because the world expects us now to top that with the next one. I guess they probably say that to Steven Spielberg or something right about making movies. And so that started us. We did that. He loved the Mirage. Steve was very leery of technology. He's very much a showman.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Mark Fuller

And one of the hardest challenges, and if you remember standing there, you don't see any nozzles come up out of that lake surface. It's just a beautiful lake. And getting those little babies to appear on cue and disappear, and there are thousands of them, was as hard as any other aspect of the fountain. And I learned that from Steve. I think whatever few fountains we'd done before that, the nozzles probably all poked up. But that gives the whole weight thing away. You can say, oh, there's gonna be a circle of jets here or something. It's like, if you had all the actors and props on the stage for every scene of a play or something, you know, it wouldn't.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Mark Fuller

wouldn't be anything left in your imagination or surprise in the next scene. And then he was really afraid, we flew to Disneyland together and we showed him what we call the shooters, those are the big ones that go up like rockets, they're very, I call them the staccato part of the fountain, you know, they're fired by compressed air which is amazingly green and energy efficient compared to pumps in the traditional ways of moving.

But I said, Steve, we need the legato side too to do music well, and we developed these kind of underwater robots, the ones that you can see sway around. There's a whole story that I won't take the time to tell you. I went back to the University of Utah and had one of my college professors help us there who had a small company on robotics. And that's what came up. A lot of it didn't work. The first time, I mean, it did work by opening day, but right up till it,

I think it was 216 of these underwater robots that have never been done before that have to move with the grace of a ballet dancer. We learned a lot of choreography on that from Kenny Ortega, who was, if you know the name, yeah. In fact, Kenny, yeah, exactly. Kenny and I are going to Dubai a week after next together. It'll be really fun. We've worked together on and off ever since then. But he said, Mark, he said, I can get humor, I can get melodrama, I can get grandeur.

Srini Rao

Uh huh. Yep. Michael Jackson.

Mark Fuller

out of your jets, just like I can out of a human performer. And of course, that's what we strive to do.

Srini Rao

So many questions come from that. First, briefly about Steve, what is it that enables somebody at his level to achieve at the level that he does? From what little research I've done, I know there have been a few books written about him. There's not a whole hell of a lot you can find about the guy, and I wonder if that's my design. But from what I'm told, he was a tobacco salesman in Las Vegas who basically became this cultural icon.

What is it enables the visionary thinking of somebody who is like that?

Mark Fuller

Oh, that's a good question. I wish I've had... I've spent a lot of time with Steve. During the Bellagio, his CFO came out to me once and said, Mark, you do know Steve's spending more time with you than he is with his wife. He said, that's pretty amazing. But he wasn't a tobacco salesman, but it was a liquor delivery salesman, yeah. Steve is, I wish I could sum him up. He pushes you so hard, and he can be brutal.

Srini Rao

Hahahaha

Srini Rao

Okay, okay, so yeah, I knew I didn't have the story completely right.

Mark Fuller

been. Well, I'll tell you a quick story. Just as we were starting to fill the Bellagio Lake, and it takes a good number of days to fill because of the water vines, and we were within a few days of filling it, and I was in another client's office or something here in LA and the receptionist said, there's a Mr. Winn on the phone for you, and I went in and picked it up, and I said, hello Steve, and he started to scream at me like you cannot imagine. You could hear it all over the office, I'm sure, because someone had told him...

that we had messed up and those little nozzles wouldn't be hidden that when the wind blew and there would be waves, troughs and peaks that you would see the nozzles. And I was pretty sure we'd calculated that. But I said, Steve, I'm sure we're on top of that. If we're not, we'll fix it. And he was pretty articulate in telling me he wished he'd never met me, wished he could burn my contact up when I'd been him. And Steve is a powerful guy.

And anyway, a few days later we filled it and the problem, it was okay. Now Steve is a exceptionally handsome man. He radiates the sense of power and intelligence, which he has. And I'm a small person, I'm about five foot seven. And so I'm standing there and I'm thinking, now we've gotta now create all these shows and I'm sure I'm gonna be working with Mr. Wynn along into the future. And that was a colorful conversation. So I walked up to Steve, took three deep breaths and said, Steve, could we talk for a minute about that phone call a couple days ago?

And you know what he did? He stepped closer to me and he put his arm around my shoulder like a big bear hug. And he said, Mark, you just have to know I was not mad at you. We just have to do fantastic work. We can't fall short on anything. I'm just passionate about the project. It wasn't about me mad at you. It was about, we can't let anything go wrong. And he said, and if you thought I was yelling at you, I'm sorry. And I thought, I'm gonna remember this day. How many billionaires tell somebody that they're sorry?

And I became a fan of Steve Wynn on that very day, and he continued to, once in a while scare me a little bit, but always inspire me and my team to get even more out of ourselves than we thought we could. And that's his gift. You can see it in everything he's touched.

Srini Rao

Stupid question, what's the water bill for like an average one of these fountain shows?

Mark Fuller

Well the power I don't know the water bill because some of it is I think they have they have a Well or something that used to irrigate the golf course that was there formerly But the last time I looked several years ago, I don't think powers changed too much about $50 a show So you got? 5,000 I think the most they've ever had they've had up to 30,000 people out there on the sidewalk to watch a show for $50 of electricity. I think that's That's pretty mate

Srini Rao

Yeah. Talk to me about the actual design process for this. Like, you know, what, you know, from sort of conception to actual, you know, execution to the final product that we see, like, does it start on pen and paper? Like, are you guys sketching? Like, what is the ideation process for something of this magnitude?

Mark Fuller

It's exactly all of those things and a lot of other things. We're really big into building physical models and mock-ups and of course The wonders you can do with CAD models and 3d computer models is of course fantastic. And that's another tool Yep, the it's interesting sometimes when we're interviewing like a young engineer out of college and

And if I say, hey, draw me a circle, draw you a circle. Where's the computer? Have you got SolidWorks installed so I can draw you a circle? And I'm thinking more like a napkin, right, and a piece of paper. Because the computers are great, but they instantly demand that you feed them all sorts of information about that circle. What should the line width be? What should the diameter be to the nearest, you know, tenth of a millimeter or something, whatever, whatever. And when you're in an ideation frame of mind, you've got this mind to hand sort of,

muscle, not just memory, but muscle connection. And if you watch somebody who can sketch, and we teach sketching here, just as they taught it to me at Stanford, just so you can get your ideas out. They don't have to be beautiful, but they flow fast that way. So we go through all those traditional sketching processes like that, and then we build small models and we tear them apart. We're not too precious about them and bigger ones. And then the place here is kind of like a...

movie studio we've got a big old back lot and something that you would call probably like a sound stage where we control light and noise and we end up build and we have a fantastic scenic shop wood shop and we build kind of a movie set section full scale not of the whole thing obviously but of a piece of it because water if you do a miniature thing the nozzles may be smaller but gravity stays at 1.0 it doesn't go down just because the nozzle smaller

So you have to really see what it's gonna be like. Is it gonna splash too much? Is it gonna be as exciting or as beautiful as you thought? So everything we do, it goes through this incredible modeling process before we commit to construction drawings to build the actual piece.

Srini Rao

Yeah, so okay, I think you probably know this as well as anybody, right? You can model something down to perfection, but then when you go into an actual implementation, things go wrong. What what went wrong? Like you mentioned earlier, there are things that weren't working again, and you know, because you're talking about something probably with what tens of thousands of moving parts with, you know, one variable that could totally screw up everything.

Mark Fuller

Yeah.

Mark Fuller

What you said about models can fool you. Yes, you get a really bright young person in here, maybe just fresh out of college, and they're a G-Wiz at a 3D modeling program. I can do it on the screen. And I said, they'll say, I can build you a fantastic 3D model of anything you can imagine. And I say, well, first of all, it won't be 3D, because I can run my hand across your screen.

It's very 2D looking like 3D. But yes, you can not only model everything that will work in the real world, you can model everything that won't work. You can build me a fantastic computer model of a lightsaber, but if I ask you to build me a real one, you can't do it just because that model fooled you. That's called science fiction movies, right? But if I ask you to build a model that works, of course then all of a sudden all the impossible.

you know, physics-limited things are off the table, so that's the value of doing, at some stage, switching to the real thing. Oh, the problems we had. Well, some of them were absolutely crazy. We did what I said, we followed our preaching, and we modeled these big shooters, we call them. If you imagine a big old pipe, let's say, I don't know, 10 inches in diameter, and 10 or 12 feet tall.

you stick it in the lake and there's a little flapper valve on the bottom so that the water rushes in and then when it's filled to the top, because the top of it's at the water level, the little flappers go shut on the bottom. So you've got this sealed pipe full of water. Now if I inject a big high pressure bubble of air in the bottom, it's kind of like if you shook a champagne bottle up, and then release it, that air bubble would expand and it pushes the water out of the top. That's the technology we use.

Fantastically more energy-efficient and green pardon my cough um Then if we use pumps for reasons, I can tell you if you're interested, but you're probably not so I won't unless begged So so we build all those Shooters and we mock them up here and we used air compressed at 120 PSI If you go to Home Depot you buy a compressor if you've garage or something it will compress air up to about 120 pounds per square inch

Mark Fuller

But to get the height we wanted at Bellagio, we wanted to go twice that, 240. So we thought, well, what's the big deal? We just, we can't buy a 240 pound compressor at Home Depot. So yeah, we'll take, there's no risk in that. So we were up there, the lake was filled. Everything was full. Mr. Wynn was out there. We were just getting ready to start choreographing it and we'd fire these shooters. And instead of, you've seen it. So, you know what I mean? These missiles of water, they come out, they launch and then they're disappeared.

the jet would stick open, so it would look like old faithful on a bad day would just sputter and sputter and sputter, right? And destroy any sense of being tied to music. And you might, we have, we have over a thousand shooters of two different sizes there, but if one of them is stuck open, it's like if you go to a fancy dinner and you're all in whites and tails and you got a ketchup spot.

Srini Rao

Hahaha!

Mark Fuller

on your lapel. What's the only thing anybody would look at? It's that quicker spot, right? So one of those jets, even Mr. Winn, with his little bit impaired eyesight, what's wrong with that jet over there, Mark? And so we would send, we had all of our engineers, we had about, I don't know, just under 30 of them, we sent them to dive school, because the lake's about 12 feet deep. They all got the PADI certified divers licenses while they're working on the project for us.

So they would, a couple of them would go out, dive to the bottom, unbolt this shooter valve, bring it up to the surface, and we figured, oh, it's probably got dirt in it. You know, it's a construction site, some dirt got in the air piping, and you know, it's got sand in it or something. So we'd set it on the work table, take it all apart, and it was sparkling clean. Then we'd put it back together, go out there, dive, put it in, and boom, it would work like a million bucks, and then half an hour later, it would stick open again and do this horrible sputtering thing.

And we were just mystified and we're getting uncomfortably close to opening. So I reached out, met the head of the fluid mechanics department at Caltech, and he did a computer model, very sophisticated, a reasonably sophisticated physics model of what was happening. And if you've ever painted something with a can of spray paint, you shake, shake the little ball on the bottom.

or hairspray or anything like that, if you hold the button down a long time, the can gets cold in your hand because as air expands, it absorbs energy to accomplish the expansion, it's a thermodynamic principle. So we had this air that we were now pressurizing to 240 psi, very highly compressed, and then when we opened the valve, it expands to room temperature. It got so cold, and the professor modeled it.

it was that air was dropping to minus 50 degrees. Now this is in the lake, about 80 degree water in the middle of the summer in Las Vegas. And the air going through that valve would drop to minus 50 degrees. And also there's a little bit of humidity in all air, even in Las Vegas. So that moisture would freeze and what was happening was, was actually forming an ice ball inside of the valve that would open and close just like you were at the Arctic and then that ice would stick it.

Mark Fuller

And then this takes you to what was the Ed Ground post story where the murderer used a knife made of ice. You remember, I don't know if you remember that one and he murdered somebody. And then when the cops came around, there was no murder weapon because it would have melted into a puddle of water by the time the cops got there. So, so our, our culprit here, which these ice balls, soon as the divers would, would take them apart and that 80 degree water would hit that ice ball, they were long since melded. There was no evidence when they got to the surface. Um, so that's one of the crazy problems we had.

Srini Rao

Wow. So one thing I wonder, because I talked to Wallace Nichols about this. He wrote a book which I'm sure you're probably familiar with called The Surprising Science of Water. And we were.

Mark Fuller

You know, I don't know that and I'm going to have to get that. I would have thought I'd...

Srini Rao

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, we're talking about why water has the effect on people that it does. And he was, you know, he's a surfer slash marine biologist and surfing, it makes sense to me, right? He said, you know, the minute you get into the water, you know, you, you know, activate the default mode network and, you know, you kind of, you know, are sort of like in a very different state of mind. And we actually had a very brief conversation about fountains. And, you know, the idea was that, you know, by meeting people,

near bodies of water, it changes the interaction that you have with them significantly. And I thought to myself, like, all right, from now on, anytime I go on a date, I'm going to make sure there's a fountain close by. Yeah, because I don't live in California anymore. But when I did, anytime I met somebody, you know, I would have them meet me at the beach because especially as like podcast listeners, I'm like, all right, well, if I think you're an idiot, then at least I can get a surf session. And if you're cool, then we're at this really beautiful place. But fountains in particular have this sort of magical quality to them almost, particularly the ones that you design.

Mark Fuller

I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.

Mark Fuller

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Why is it that they have the sort of psychological impact on people that they do? Because, you know, like I said, I mean, I think, I mean, to this day, anytime I've seen those funds, I don't like going to Vegas. And you're right. It is one of the few places in Vegas where you don't feel like you're in Vegas. But it's spellbound binding, like it's mesmerizing to watch. You know, I mean, and I wonder why the water in particular has that effect on people.

Mark Fuller

I've given some thought to that and I'll tell you a kind of a surprising reason that I think it's true. And this comes from my theater background. In any good play, there's always a protagonist and an antagonist, right? Good guy, bad guy fighting against each other. And they're separate individuals, of course. Water is simultaneously a protagonist and an antagonist. It's beautiful. We love to swim in it, like you say, ski on it when it's frozen, surf in it, splash around. Kids love to do it.

And yet, all you have to do is turn on the television during a hurricane like Katrina, and you realize the terror that water can bring and how destructive it can be. I read recently that the one thing that's in common among all sailors of all navies of all nations in the world is that their greatest fear is drowning. Now you'd think somebody who's on a boat for their life would quickly get over that. They don't. So...

When water can snuff, if you have a small child at home, you have a swimming pool and the phone rings and you start to dash in to get it, immediately your heart will race. You think, God, 30 seconds, my baby could drown. So it has in itself this charm, this seductive, I mean, essential when you feel it against your body, and it can take a life or a hundred or a thousand lives and laugh it off, you know? That's an amazing.

property. I can't think of anything else. I mean, fire doesn't fire. Fire destroys a lot of stuff and in very small amounts we can enjoy it. But at a grand scale, water mixes that sense of joy and almost playful inconsiderate destruction together. So that there has to be some you know some way that touches us, especially when I don't know what the number is, but what is it? We're 82% water or something physically.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Mark Fuller

When the JPL guys go to look for life on another planet, they don't look for life, they look for water, because if there's no water, ain't gonna be no life. And we all come from water on a small scale, from our mother's womb on a large scale, evolved from the oceans. So there's these hereditary million year old connections. And then there's that psychology of something, I guess like if you were dating a serial killer or something, but you thought he or she was just so attractive, you're gonna do it anyway.

Srini Rao

Hehehe

Mark Fuller

That's a crazy analogy, you want to cut that out of this talk.

Srini Rao

Well, it's funny to hear you sort of talk about both the destructive and beautiful qualities of water because as a surfer you kind of experience the same thing, right? There are days when you go out there and you feel like the ocean is like your greatest lover and then there are days when you're like, this is the most indifferent lover on the planet who wants to basically hand my ass to me.

Mark Fuller

Yeah. Yeah, that's it right there.

Srini Rao

Wow, so to go back to what Steve Wynn said about this being the greatest work of your life, it kind of reminds me of sort of that Elizabeth Gilbert speech, right? It's like, how do you follow and you pray love? So for you, when you've done something that is this grand, this known, because I'm sure everybody listening to this probably knows about the Fountains of Lajun. I know you've done a ton of other stuff that's also a huge magnitude, but that's kind of in a lot of ways. I mean, to me, the minute I read that, I was like, yeah, that was what got me.

So how do you maintain a sense of sort of, you know, creative persistence and not be forever defined by this one thing?

Mark Fuller

Thanks for watching!

Mark Fuller

Yeah, like an actor who doesn't want to be thought of as a cowboy. I was like, that was his first role. Yeah. Early on, I was standing by one of our fountains, and I overheard somebody say, wow, I never knew water could do that before. And that phrase struck in my mind. I thought, maybe that should be our judgment if we hear that. So we take one of the most ordinary substances on the planet. We all take it for granted. We don't.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Mark Fuller

normally look at it even twice. And if we can bring out an aspect of its personality or its essence or its being, that will be a pretty good achievement. And then I had, in the fairly early days of the company, we'd done, I don't know, maybe a couple dozen features, and someone called me up, somebody that I guess I'd gone to school with, he said, I just saw Fountain, da-da-da-da-da, shopping center. Was that yours? I said, yes, it was. He said, I knew it, I know your work, and there's just some quality to it that he, without.

reading a sign or anything. It's yours. So we always look for those ways of just catching, you know, catching people's interest in the most ordinary thing in the world and allowing them to see it freshly with the, you know, the eyes of a child when they, when you see something new for the first time. That's a challenge because water's all around us but that's really, that's the goal.

Srini Rao

Wow. So two final questions for you. You've accomplished what would be a massive degree of success by any measure. How has your personal definition of success changed with age and life experience?

Mark Fuller

Um.

Mark Fuller

Well, and I think I share this with Steve Jobs and Walt Disney and a few other of the people that are my heroes. And that is I don't measure success by piling up money. Now I'm a capitalist, I'm not ashamed to say that, and money is incredibly useful to have. But I think if you do really great things, and you have to work hard to get to that point, then people are attracted to them and you can make money and that's what enables you to do the next.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Mark Fuller

great thing. So I like to in my own way and with my own medium and whenever I say I am speaking for my whole team of several hundred people here, we love touching people. You mentioned standing at the Bellagio and you could look to your left while you're there and it might be Rupert Murdoch with his billions standing on one side of you and it might be a homeless person standing to the other side.

And they're both there, neither of them paid a nickel to see that feature, because our business model doesn't require the ultimate viewer or user to pay. And they're happy. And we see people all the time, they propose there, they hug each other, they hug strangers. We coined a phrase a little bit. What do we do here? Well, we don't really create fountains. We create magnets for human connection.

because you connect with the people that you're with. It just makes you, I don't know, you feel good. Like we said, that essence of water. You connect with your inner self, I think. I get very contemplative when I'm in, I just kind of like when you go to the Muir Woods or something, when you're in an environment where you're just all inspired by something of nature and seeing water on the scale, Bellagio certainly does that. And then you connect directly with nature itself, which is...

harder and harder to do because everything wants to be on a 4k res screen these days instead of the real thing and we have not evolved to relate to things on screens To the degree we relate to the real stuff

Srini Rao

Wow, beautiful. Well, I have one last question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the Unmistakable Creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Mark Fuller

To make something unmistakable?

Mark Fuller

Share with me just a little more what you mean by unmistakable.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, it's kind of funny when the moment that you said that somebody looked at something you did and they knew it was yours. That is my definition of unmistakable. That's my personal definition.

Mark Fuller

Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. Right. No, that's perfect definition. Meaning, meaning unique enough that it's, it's not confused with anything else.

Mark Fuller

I know you've asked that to some really amazing people. I think you have to clear away all of the, I'm going to call them templates, you know, we all work on Word and stuff and everything is so much easier if you've got a template and you just fill in the blanks. And I think that's one of the worst things in life. Would you propose to somebody, would you download some proposal templates? You know, I mean the things that really matter in life.

have to be built word by word, stick by stick, originally. And then they will be unmistakable. And I think most of us are sophisticated enough that we can spot something that originated on a template. I mean, I'm asked all the time, Mark, why the heck do you spend all the time, and it takes a lot of time, choreographing one of these surely computers and AI and stuff they can figure out.

you know, how to move the water to the music. Well, that's because we don't move the water to the music. We were inspired by it, and we create a set of moves that feel right for it. But if you had the Rockettes lined up and you computerized version of the Rockettes, and you said every time you hear a middle C, you kick your left leg six inches high, that's what you'd get, or maybe some more interesting variation on that with AI. But that would be derived from a formula, an AI's is just a.

massive series of interactive formulas. And I don't think the human mind is. So you start like the classic statement, white sheet of paper, clear mind, not a variation on something you or somebody else has done. I mean, you're informed by that, but then you build it brick by brick, not filling in the blanks between sentences that just have blanks here and there.

Srini Rao

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom and your insights with our listeners. This has been fascinating. Where can people find out more about you, your work and everything they're up to?

Mark Fuller

Well, right now you can probably catch us on a lot of the new shows and on our Instagram page and whatnot because we just finished a fantastic fountain that I will say I think is the best work we've done in our whole life at the Dubai Expo 2020. It's totally different than anything we've ever done. It's got huge queue lines. I'm told it's the most popular.

thing and the whole expo is fantastic and we're seeing it's the biggest and best exposition on the planet. So if you, the name of it is Surreal, S-U-R-R-E-A-L or just Dubai Expo Water Feature. And then our website which is Wet Design, as one word, wetdesign.com, either the mobile version or the laptop version.

Srini Rao

And for everybody listening, we'll wrap the show with that.