If listening to John made him feel less like snapping, then listening to Arthur does the opposite. He's not ready to hear a positive spin on that decade: not when he's already pushing down and tying up a bit of a screaming fit, and not from someone who nearly had his thumbs in Charlie's eyeballs not twenty minutes before.

John doesn't get a pass either with his fucking nodding. They both get a wide, unfriendly smile, though it's Arthur who gets:

"Don't blow smoke up my ass when you got no fuckin' idea what I did there day to day."

Because he hasn't told them. He hasn't said, though maybe John already knows, that in ten years you don't just sit there and say "I shan't say": you grind off pieces of yourself as the chains get tighter, you look for comfort where it's a bad idea, you humiliate yourself for reeds on your floor or a few minutes of sunlight. And his time with the King directly wasn't even what he was alluding to, not for the most part. He's told them that he was thrown into the pits, but he has no reason to think they know what that means, not fully.