Heroes in Business - Mark Fuller, CEO Water Entertainment Technologies, worlds largest performing fountains Dubai Expo, Bellagio Las Vegas

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

Without water there is no life. Mark Fuller, CEO Water Entertainment Technologies, created worlds largest performing fountains in Dubai Expo, Bellagio Las Vegas and 200 more around the world is interviewed by David Cogan founder of Eliances and famous celebrity host of the Eliances Heroes Show broadcast on am and fm network channels, online syndication and on over 100 TV channels.   Chat Directly. Hire Quickly. Hirect is the first chat-based hiring app for start-ups. Chat and interview candidates anytime, anywhere. Download the  

up in the sky look it's captivating it's energizing it's alliances heroes alliances is the destination for entrepreneurs investors ceos inventors leaders celebrities and startups where our heroes in business align now here's your host flying in, David Kogan, founder of Eliance's. Yep, and we're back. And again, I mean, I just, when I wake up on these days, it's just amazing because, you know, I've got the opportunity to be able to share with you stories from people who are making an impact on the world, bringing joy to others, just really making an impact and ones that we could always learn from. And thank you for the feedback we continue to have

when I had the Grammy winning award band, OK Go lead singer on. So make sure that you check out the past episodes of alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-E-S.com. And make sure you stick around because later on in the show, we've got the CEO of Steinberg Sports coming on. Yes, he's the one that negotiated the $650 million contract with Patrick Mahomes. So make sure you stay tuned. Well, I got to tell you,

I can't wait to introduce our next guest today. You know, to be able to make a living playing with water and be able to make an impact on so many people, you're going to be blown away of what he does for a career. Welcome to the show, Mark Fuller, the CEO of WET, Welcome to the show, Mark Fuller, the CEO of WET, Water Entertainment Technologies. You can reach him at wetdesign.com. Mark, steal the thunder. You do so much incredible things with water, and you make a living playing with water. Tell us some of the amazing things you've done with water.

Hi, David. You know, they're truly the most amazing. And this is like, you know, fresh, what should I say? Not out of the oven, fresh out of the clouds. Can I say that? I just flew back from Dubai where the Dubai Expo has just opened, the biggest, most spectacular expo slash World's Fair in the history of the world. And we did the centerpiece water feature there. We're doing waves that start nine feet high in a coliseum that you can stand in the middle of. They rush down at you to the music of Ramin Djawadi, who composed Game of Thrones and so many other pieces, original music for this. And then just before they wash you away, they reverse and wash up the walls. I mean, we sort of work with nature and sometimes nature wins, sometimes we win. This time wins. Sometimes we win.

This time, I think we win. The water goes backwards. How do you, though, how did you even, like, I mean, when did you say, you know what, I want to make a living? This is what I want to do for a career. Well, I don't know that I did make a living. We just plain have fun. You know, when I go down to the cash room, the finance guys, the other end of the building one day and say, you know, we still in business? Yeah, we're still in business.

So we go out and knock out another one. I mean, we did the Bellagio, as you know, and what's, I guess, still the largest fountain in the world, the Dubai Fountain. And a lot of really precious small ones along the way. But water is, well, water is the essential element of life, right? We live not too far from JPL. And when those guys shoot off a space probe to look for life, they actually don't look for life. They look for water, because without water, they cannot be life. Now, how did you create, I mean, the Bellagio is certainly one of the most

famous ones also. I mean, you know, how many millions upon millions of people have been entertained by it, and there's not even a cost to see it. You know, that's what I think brings so many and we've got I've got a team of about 200 people here. And one of the things that brings us to work every day is the fact that you can be by one of our features. Take that, Bellagio. You can look to your left and it might be Rupert Murdoch, you know, multibillionaire. And you can look to the right, might be a homeless person. They both probably have tears in their eyes because it's a beautiful experience. They're connecting with the people around them and with nature. They both paid the same entrance price, which is free. So our business model works that because we draw literally tens

of millions of people. And then, you know, after that, they'll go into the shopping malls or the casinos or the resorts or whatever. And so the owners make a huge return on their investment in what we do, but the people themselves get to enjoy it for absolutely free. Do you ever look back and just in awe of what you've been able to create? I mean, where you're creating sound and music and water and movement all happening at the same time? Well, I give myself a very few rules to live by, but one of them is never look back. So that's the short answer to your question. I don't. But looking forward, you know, we're always looking for ways, I'm going to say to connect people, because especially in the pandemic and the masks

and all this stuff that's gone on, I think as humans, we crave connection to our families, to people that are strangers around us. You know, I talk to people in elevators when I get in. It's just, it's a natural instinct. And sometimes you make a friend that way. And we also, by what we do, we connect with nature. You know, water, fire, sunlight, sounds, and music. I think we got a couple of, I don't know, 10 million years of, you know, built into us of that as creatures. And we're looking at each other on this flat screen now, right? And some of the kids will say, oh, it's 3D. It's not 3D. I can touch it. It's very, very flat. So we have a craving for what's real in life. And that's what we work with, not simulations. I love iPads and all that stuff, don't get me wrong, but we connect people with what is real. And I think that's essential to

all of us as human beings. And again, we've got with us Mark Fuller, the CEO of Wet Water Entertainment Technology. He created the Bellagio, many other incredible water creations and music creations and just came back from Dubai. I mean, truly incredible stuff. You can reach him at wetdesign.com because you're listening and watching me, David Kogan, host of the Alliance's Hero Show.

So make sure you go to alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-S.com to check out past interviews. And thank you to our sponsor, Hirect.us. That's H-I-R-E-C-T.us. They are the app for startups, for hiring startups. You're out there. You need to hire. You've got to check out this app. Make sure you go to hirect.us, H-I-R-E-C-T.us. Mark, at what point, though, you know, I mean, I went to college. There was never the major of studying water. You know, I never saw this in any book, any classrooms, anything of that. Like, how did this even come to be where you're able to make a living doing it? You know, when I went to college, David, and I took five and a half years to get what you

might say is a four-year degree, but I found college to be kind of a Disneyland of knowledge. So I took classes in theater. I took classes in physics, in architecture, although my actual degrees in civil engineering, I took a lot of liberal arts classes. And I want to say one thing to all the young people going to college or anywhere. Learn what interests you and fascinates you and what you're curious about. There is not a single thing that you will learn that somewhere in life you won't find an application for. And mine just happened to be all these crazy things put together. I mean, remember Steve Jobs' comment about he stumbled into a calligraphy class and voila, a few years later, you later, we have the wonderful Mac,

flowing fonts and so forth. And that's not limited to Steve Jobs. That's something all of us can do. Learn things that are fascinating, meet people that you're curious about, find out what they do. It'll come together. I promise everybody will. And Mark, but you're creating things that have never been done before. Even what you mentioned in Dubai with water moving in opposite directions and being almost so submersed in it without getting wet. Yeah, it's, you know, we always say to ourselves, suppose there were a touch of magic in life. I mean, I think most of us love Game of Thrones because, well, when the show starts, there is no magic, right? The dragons are all supposedly dead. A thousand years pass and they come to life.

And, you know, those of us who are Christians remember back, oh, ancient times there were miracles and so forth. But it seems like today, gosh, there just isn't any magic in the world. I don't think that should be. So what we do is we touch life with a bit of magic. That might be absence of gravity, water flowing backwards, water conducting light like a liquid fiber optic, and you can send signals over it, things that you can step into and think you're going to get washed away, and suddenly you're walking across the water like you yourself are magic. That brings a spark of life and the idea that there's this

underlying beauty and we need to reach out and engage with it. I think many people don't realize the amount of time and energy and work that it takes to actually maintain it. I was recently at Bellagio a few weeks ago in Las Vegas and I see them, you know, during the day they were doing some cleaning, some whatever things they were doing. And I was like, well, that looks like a lot of work. You know, the comment I get sometimes I'll take someone underneath and Bellagio is a great example because they have a terrific maintenance crew there. There's a lot of technology, a lot of machinery down there, but it's invisible. I mean, I'm looking at you. You're looking at me.

And, you know, we're thinking, David and Mark, there's bones and marrow and skin and tendons inside here. We don't think about that, do we? But without it, we wouldn't be having this kind of a conversation. So I think everything wonderful and complex and rich in nature has a hidden engineering to it that we don't see. We see what we're supposed to see, which is the magnificence of interaction and connection. So what's next for you now that you've finished in Dubai? What's next? What do you see in the future of creation? We've got projects in all sorts of interesting parts of the world. And each one we look at, well, we're doing a fountain now and we're starting with water that originates in the sky.

Most fountains shoot the water up and it comes back down. We're juggling with gravity. So we thought, let's do a fountain where the water starts at the top. Now, how do we do that? You'll have to come and see it. But we always put that challenge. What would make this seem magical? What would make people think, wow, I never knew water could do that before? And then you look at the person next to you and you give them a hug or something.

God, it's great to be alive. You forget your troubles of the day. That's what we strive for. Absolutely incredible. All right, so I want to do some snooping now in your office where we're at. You've got a lot of books. You've got a lot of interesting things behind you. Tell our audience, viewers, and listeners something unique,

something you like, something that stands out. Well, if you could see, if I spun my computer around, you'd see the opposite of these books. You'd see a ton of ancient crystals and rocks and things from nature, because I love the things that are natural in the world. And on this side, as you say, a gazillion books. I think somebody did a rough count. My library is 7,000 or 8,000 books these days. I haven't read them all, but I know what's in a good deal of them because it's just fascinating to learn different things and bring them together. And what's my favorite book? Well, it's the one that I'm reading right now.

What's my favorite fountain? Well, it's the one that we're just about to work on or in the middle of it. You want to keep life fresh for yourself because there's just so much out there to discover and play with and enjoy. because there's just so much out there to discover and play with and enjoy. Mark, how long does it actually take? You must have a tremendous amount of patience to actually create, test, launch, and finalize a fountain. There's some people here on our team who would disagree with the patience idea. I have a red ball cap, and the only word it says on it is today.

Actually, I have two. The other one says now, exclamation point point because I'm not a terribly patient person. But it takes, you know, from the time you get an idea and then it has to go through construction and stuff anywhere from maybe one to one to three years to bring one of these pieces from from a sketch and an idea into a reality with 10 million people enjoying it. Now, did I hear correctly you actually, too, were a Disney Imagineer? I was. I was there about, what, five and a half years working during the era when we were designing and building Epcot and Tokyo Disneyland and doing some upgrades to Disneyland itself. Wow.

Wow. So share with us some secrets of advice you would have for students now who want to really get into a creative career, maybe something that, again, that doesn't exist like something you created. What kind of secrets can you share with them to be able to find, develop, hone in, and actually implement? implement? You know, the tendency, I think, in college lots of times is to pick a subject and then go deeper and deeper, you know, a PhD or whatever. And those are great. I'm not criticizing that. But, well, I was walking down the street the other day, and I happened to be looking down because I was in thought, and I noticed the sidewalk pieces, sometimes they break or they crack or something. And inevitably, between where two different objects meet, that's where life comes up. You see little blades of grass or little flowers. And I think the invention and discovery of the future is not deeper and deeper into any one topic. But well, like here, for instance,

we have people who are expert pattern designers and weavers, and we've got optical engineers and computer scientists, and we build our campus so that they inevitably get together on the snack table or the Coke machine or lunch, those people don't usually talk to each other. And the most interesting things come out of those conversations from people with totally disparate knowledge bases and interests. So just lead your life that way. Talk to the stranger.

Take the class that you think, wow, I have no idea what this is. Sounds kind of interesting from the title. And those are the things that will trigger you in the future to do something nobody's done before. When you create these, do you create first mini models first? Or I mean, what's the process? We start very traditionally old-fashioned pencil sketches, and then, of course, turn those into computer sketches and computer models. We still build literal, physical models because, you know, the thing about a computer model is you can model things that can't happen, right? I mean, if you don't believe that, you can do a wonderful model of a lightsaber. Okay,

go build me one. But when you have to build a physical thing, it either works or it doesn't. So we add the old we keep the old tools and we add the new ones to it. And we have what we call our back lot here. It's kind of a mini movie studio. And we'll take like the Expo found we did. We did an actual slice of it. It's like nine stories high, full scale. And that's where we developed the wave technology. Not the real ones like a Coliseum, but there's an actual piece like a movie set there. So the modeling starts small and just gets bigger and bigger and more evolved until you've worked out all the problems here. What kind of budget even exists for some of these things?

Oh, you know, they can start it. I mean, they're not inexpensive because they're they're major public attractions but from from a million dollars or so to uh well the dubai fountain is i mean is published at a 200 million dollar cost that was what what 12 or 15 years ago and it was published in the same paragraph uh the the chairman of emar who was the company that commissioned us to build it said they have made 10 times that in terms of return because all the rooms at the hotels and the residences that look down on it, of course, those are the premium demand ones. So it's an investment. It's not a cost.

It's an investment in the property and an investment in the joy of the people that come to see it. Mark, how nervous are you, like with the Dubai one? Again, you're there and you're like, okay, we're live. This is the show. Someone hits the button. I don't know if it's you that hits the button or the person that paid the tab on it,

whatever it may be, hits the button and you're like, please, everything. Well, we try to have a whole lot of small buttons that we hit one at a time. You know, the days or weeks leading up to it so that when the big button hits, it all works. But there's no question when you're pushing the boundaries, there are things that require tweaking.

And there's opportunities to, you know, tweak and refine stuff. My hero, if I were to pick one, would be Walt Disney. And I remember once he said, you know, the downside of making movies is once you release it to the studios, it's done. The wonderful thing about Disneyland is I can walk through there on weekends and figure out tweaks and any improvements. I'm headed back to Dubai because we're going to tweak some of the choreography with some new ideas we have even the next few weeks. Wow. Does the Bellagio one, does the music change periodically or is it the same music all the time? You know, that's such a great question we take on on the bellagio we take existing pieces of music might be a classic frank

sinatra piece might be a popular piece and then with that music we interpret it visually how the water would work with it it's not people say why don't you have a computer do that it would be incredibly boring suppose you had the new york rockettes and you said every time there's a middle C, kick your left leg or something. That's how a computer would handle it. So we can take a piece of music and put a human choreographer to interpret it and another choreography and you get two very different pieces. But in those cases, we start with existing music. And then my friend Ramin Javadi, who composed this wonderful score for this feature, and he composed, like I said, Game of Thrones, Westworld and stuff.

He's given, all the movie composers are given a scene, right? It might be a car crash, it might be a love scene or something. And then they have to create the music to support the visual. And I said to Ramin, here's an opportunity. Suppose we both co-create. We'll create the visuals concurrently with you scoring the music. And you'll say, could you do more of this? And we'll say, could you do more of that? And we both had in our team so much fun doing that. And it's a first. It literally, I think, is a creative first and it shows in the work. Where does your inspiration come from, though? How do you come up even with the ideas of what you create? Where is it feeding from? Again, it's just when I grew up in Salt Lake in the fall, the leaves would fall from the trees.

And my dad was a great gardener. My mom would dig a big hole, put the leaves in and cover it with soil. And then in the spring, we called it a compost heat pile. Right. And it would kind of, I don't know, the bacteria would get it steaming and you'd have this wonderful fertilizer, but it was all that sort of junky stuff you put in there. I consider this my human compost heap. I put every dead leaf, every scrap, every piece of knowledge or something. I just, I look at it, I feed it in here. And then sometime, you know, in the middle of the night or the middle of the winter or something, my mind puts stuff together and out will pop an idea. Could be in the middle of a conversation like this.

Got it. Wow. That's amazing. Amazing, again, what you're doing. And again, you're listening, watching me, David Kogan, host of the Alliance's Hero Show. Thank you again to our sponsor, Hirect.us. That enables hiring app for startups, chat and interview candidates anytime, anywhere. Make sure you go to Hirect.us. That's H-I-R-E-C-T.us. Well, Mark, you create captivating water designs that

delight millions upon millions who see them, creating an impact on those that are watching. That's a hero, CEO of Wet Designs, creating incredible, incredible things like at the Bellagio in Dubai and more. The Expo Water Feature in Dubai, make sure that you go to wetdesign.com. This has been David Kogan with the Alliance of Hero Show. Thank you, David. design.com this has been david cogan with the alliance of hero show thank you david