Uh, talk us through what the conditions were like and how you coped mentally with that.

Yeah, the c- the conditions were, were...

Well, as you can imagine, Egypt isn't known for, for its benevolent prison system [laughs].

It was pretty rough.

Um, there was one...

I, I, I was moved around quite a few prisons.

Initially, I was in one tiny police cell about eight foot square.

You must be pretty sensitive to that, which I imagine is why you've launched this big, um, other part of your career as, as a media freedom advocate.

Tell, tell people why freedom of the press is so important.

Because in a democracy, there, there's a reason we single out press freedom as a subset of freedom of speech, and it's not because you wanna privilege a particular class of individual.

It's because we recognize that in a, in a, in any kind of, in any society, um, the government has enormous power.

The, the huge asymmetry of power that rests with the government.

And yes, there are formal mechanisms for holding that power in check for, for redressing the imbalance, but the press is an essential part of that mechanism for, for, for keeping check on, on the way power works and for representing and pushing back and representing the interests of, of, of ordinary human beings that live in, uh, beneath that, that government.

That's what, that's why press freedom matters.

But that information flow only has value if it's produced in line with a set of ethics and standards that, that, um, makes that information reliable and trustworthy and valuable in its own way.

Yes, yes.