Mark Burr | Primary Water Wells, Hidden Abundance, & The Story Of Steve Riess

Summary

Geohydrologist Mark Burr argues that the looming global water crisis is manufactured, claiming the Earth continuously generates vast amounts of 'primary water' deep below the bedrock. He tells the story of German mining engineer Stephen Riess, who reportedly drilled 70 successful deep wells in 72 attempts in places experts called hopeless, only to face lawsuits, government dismissal, and opposition from a California water establishment invested in dams and aqueducts. Burr connects this alleged suppression to a broader 'scarcity spell' used by elites to control resources, and describes his own company's efforts to locate primary water worldwide.

Key takeaways

• 1Stephen Riess, a German mining engineer and geochemist, reportedly drilled 70 successful primary water wells out of 72 attempts, starting with a 'Genesis well' in El Dorado Canyon south of Las Vegas.
• 2The 1960 book 'New Water for a Thirsty World' by Michael Salzman, with a foreword by Aldous Huxley and funding from Culligan founder Emmett Culligan, documented Riess's work and is said to have been suppressed by water interests.
• 3The USGS Water Resources Division allegedly issued an unindexed five-page document in October 1954 arguing against primary water, and a 1953 Ventura County water report reportedly omitted Riess's Simi Valley wells producing 5.4 million gallons per day.
• 4Riess allegedly sold land to oilman Clint Murchison Sr. in 1953 for a record California price and offered to drill thousands of backup wells along the California Aqueduct route, which Gov. Pat Brown's State Water Project bypassed.
• 5Burr cites William Rubey's work on water from Earth's interior, Thomas Gold's outgassing theory, and Steven Jacobsen's 'Earth's Deep Water Cycle' as scientific support, and claims Peter Gleick's 'Peak Water' paper revived scarcity narratives.
• 6Burr says Riess used a gamma ray scintillation device from Operation Paperclip scientist Dr. Armin Bickel, and that Brown's gas / HHO technology has been suppressed.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

Well, I'm just a man whose intentions are good. From the Sunshine State, I'm Greg Carlwood. And when we unpack the way the world got so twisted up with the widespread complete acquiescence to corrupt institutions and a few elite bloodline family trees, one of the major justifications or rationalizations that fueled this parasitic pyramidal paradigm has been that resources are scarce, careful management is needed, and extraction as well as distribution should only be handled by a select few professionals. When all else fails, if you need more, wage war and take it. But the amount of authoritarian control as well as war-torn killing under the guise of this scarcity spell cannot be adequately calculated and is backwards on almost every level. From the superior nutrient density and abundance of naturally grown crops versus costly grocery store offerings and the construction of our fractional reserve debt-based credit system to fuels that liberate rather than shackle people and even down to the monopoly on so-called black gold itself, being a substance that the earth makes in abundance as opposed to the scarcity propaganda perpetuated by the fossil fuel fiction. Name your category and it's worse than you think, with consequences more drastic than many can even conceive. And what if this mental conditioning that applies to most other things we find metered and managed in our lives also applies to water? Well, turns out it does, and with us to break the programming of water as a scarce resource and expose the hidden truth of Earth's deep-down generation of abundant primary water is Mark Burr. Mark has had quite a life. ...

Excerpt from The Higherside Chats, Jul 26, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.