Hello everyone, I'm pleased today to be speaking with Jeff Sandifer, who someone I've known for

a number of years and worked together on a variety of projects. We're going to talk today about

childhood education and about his background, depending on which platform you're viewing.

Jeff is an entrepreneur and a socratic teacher, which is a teacher, by the way, who tends to ask

questions rather than provide answers. He began his first business at the age of 16,

then trained as an engineer, and then went on to graduate from the Harvard Business School.

He has started and run many successful businesses, the most recent of which is Sandifer

Capital Partners, an oil and gas investment firm with several billion dollars in assets.

He's also started multiple academic programs and schools, going to concentrate on that today,

such as the Acton School of Business, whose students were named the most competitive MBAs in the

nation by the Princeton Review. He's extended this work over the last 15 years into the K-12 realm.

Kindergarten through grade 12 with the Acton Academy, a cutting-edge program that blends

the one-room schoolhouse, the Socratic Method, and 21st century technology to aid each student

in changing the world themselves and the world. So Jeff, we get a chance to sit down and talk

today and to share that with a very large number of people. So we were, Jeff and I were talking

before this podcast about what we wanted to talk about. And last night, we thought about

construing this in terms of educational reform, but really the proper way to

set this conversation up is to talk about education, not so much reform, but education per se.

And so let's start a little bit by talking about your background, though. And we might just

well go back to, I guess, your early experiences in early adulthood. Let's lay that out and then we

can place in the educational discussion as appropriate. Sure. And I think, as you say today,

I'm here more as a father and a husband, then an educator or even a Socratic teacher, but

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