Picture this. It's June 1968 and overnight a killing frost wipes out nearly every wild blueberry.

At the time, John Bragg is 28 years old. He's just borrowed everything he could to build a processing plant for those blueberries.

And now he's standing in this brand new factory with no crops to process.

Bills are coming due, workers are showing up for shifts.

The whole thing is a disaster.

Most people in that situation, they'd call the bank and work out some kind of bankruptcy deal.

But John Bragg picks up the phone, but he doesn't call the bank.

He calls McCain Foods, and he asks them one question that would change everything.

Hello?

Hi, it's John Bragg.

Welcome to the Knowledge Project.

I'm your host, Shane Parrish.

In a world where knowledge is power, this podcast is your toolkit for mastering the best of what other people have already figured out.

Today, we're exploring one of the greatest untold stories in business, John Bragg. John Bragg's story reads like fiction, except it's real. He's founded three companies in three entirely different industries from blueberries to telecommunications

to aviation. Two of the three companies are worth billions, and the third one is well on the way

to that. Not only is John Bragg the largest grower and processor of wild blueberries in the world,

but he owns North America's largest private telecommunications company. And if that wasn't crazy enough, imagine doing it all from a small town that he's never left

with a population of just over 1,100 people.

But the part of the story I think you'll most like is how he did it.

He defied nearly every rule about where and how success is supposed to happen.

This isn't our first episode on John. I interviewed him in episode 204, and his story captivated me so completely that I needed to

dedicate an entire Outliers episode to better understand how he did it. This episode draws

...