I went back to my old boarding school, up in the mountains in Korea.

I've wanted to make this video for years, but the place is genuinely hard to explain, so I kept putting it off. The campus was empty for summer break, so we just walked around and I talked through it.

I was only there a year. It's still the most concentrated stretch of my life. Mornings started with kendo or taekwondo. Lights out at 2 a.m. Dating was banned. You got demerits for speaking your own language on campus.

Was it fun? Yes but in a painful way. But almost everything about how I think now was built there. I finished my first semester in the bottom 20%, and that's where I found out — at fifteen — that some people living in the same dorm as you simply cannot be outworked.

Watch this and I think you'll understand why I turned out the way I did.
In the last video I talked about how I built a career on languages. Worth watching alongside this one.

▼ Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:43 Back at my old school
01:42 The school's size and admissions process
04:04 The last stage of admissions is a 5km run
04:52 A day in the dorms
06:42 The domestic and international tracks
07:17 What kind of student Tony was
08:19 Surviving exam week
09:39 How the school was founded, and what it costs
11:02 English Only Policy and the demerit system
12:01 No dating, and dorm life
14:11 Thursday student court
15:07 Weekend escapes and fried chicken
16:21 "There are people far smarter than me"
17:53 Dorm desks assigned by class rank
19:14 Why he chose this school
20:26 The average admitted student scored 112 on the TOEFL
22:09 His parents' intentions, and Korean identity
23:00 "So that school's finished, then"
24:34 Why he transferred out
25:29 Picking one subject and taking first in the school
26:07 Was this kind of education worth it
26:39 The friendships that outlasted it
27:16 Outro