EP 1,061 - Ian Bick (Podcaster/TikTok Star/Comeback Story) on Going To Jail at 18, What It's Like In Prison & Interviewing Convicts, Taking To TikTok - I AM RAPAPORT: STEREO PODCAST

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Iron rap Port Stereo Podcast Live and direct with a
guy who I met on social media.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
This this could go wrong.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
I met a guy on social media, a guy with
creepy glasses and funny stories. Ian Bick, Welcome to the
Iron rap Port Stereo Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time.
Thanks for coming.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
Mike, thank you so much for having man we connected
with and may remember you DM me.

Speaker 4 (00:38):
I was like, holy shiv my grap up for it.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Don't say that I DM you.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
They and I looked like I saw the sitt at
the creepy guy with the glasses. Anyways, Ian Bick, your
stories on TikTok is where I saw them first on
TikTok are what made me reach out to you because
your story yourself about getting arrested, going to prison, the

(01:04):
way you tell your story, and then you have developed
and grown and made a big business. Now it's a business,
I mean social media is a business of your own.
Interviewing other people who have gone through the system for
one reason or another. A lot of times I have

(01:24):
actors on the podcast, I have athletes, I have you know, rappers.
So tell people your story, like how did we meet,
Like what would do you remember what the first thing? Like,
I saw your your TikTok video?

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Which one? What was it?

Speaker 1 (01:38):
How did you go viral? How did you become so
viral on social media? Tell me that story first. Okay,
so it was last August. I was working at Whole
Foods market. I was the manager of prepared foods. Worked
my way up after prison.

Speaker 3 (01:52):
I got out in twenty nineteen after serving nearly three years,
and I worked my way up from making fifteen bucks
an hour to thirty two dollars an hour as a
prep foodsman.

Speaker 4 (02:00):
And I would have made a hundred k last year
with overtime.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
And people laugh at that, but they don't realize there's
a lot of money in the grocery business if you
work overtime and it's owned by Amazon, crazy money.

Speaker 1 (02:10):
I don't think people should laugh at anything and anybody
working the way the world is right now, and especially
somebody busting their ass. I don't care if it's Whole Foods.
I don't care if it's doing construction, I don't care
if it's doing podcasts. Anybody busting their ass working I respect.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Go ahead.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
Yeah, I mean people do hate though, you know, really,
I think when you come from like I was at
a high point, owning a night club at eighteen, and
then they see when you're in a small town like
Danberry and I'm sitting there, you know, flipping burgers.

Speaker 4 (02:39):
Maybe they're laughing.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
You know, they think it's funny, right because they the
social media makes it so it's like a downfall. When
someone's in the news getting arrested and then they end
up working like that, they think their life's over. I
still have people to this day saying I thought you're
still in jail because the media said I was facing
one hundred and twenty years in prison.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 (02:57):
So, anyways, about this time last year, a year ago,
my friend who was a videographer for the club back
in the day, said, Ian, you got to get on TikTok.

Speaker 4 (03:07):
And I was so anti TikTok.

Speaker 3 (03:08):
Through COVID everything, I had occasionally watch videos because I'm
the type of person that doesn't like something I don't understand.
So I didn't understand. I didn't understand the concept of videos.
But he's like, you've got to start telling your story
on social media. And at this point I had done
an HBO Max documentary. Weice did a documentary on me
but it didn't get me anywhere, didn't make any money
from it. It didn't elevate me to the level I

(03:30):
thought that those things were going to do. And so
what happens is he convinces me to start posting and
I'm doing Instagram story time.

Speaker 4 (03:38):
I called it once a day.

Speaker 3 (03:39):
I'd sit behind the HBO Max poster and I'd do
a selfie video and I'm doing one story each day,
putting music behind it. Got like five six thousand views.
I started going to TikTok doing one a day. First
one does a thousand, second one does maybe a thousand,
two thousand. Its just me talking about times running the nightclub,
like crazy stories like not paying the elect and sticking

(04:01):
a bunch of wood in front of the meter so
that ever sorts company would turn it off.

Speaker 4 (04:06):
Crazy things like that. And on my sixth video.

Speaker 3 (04:09):
I got COVID the day I was supposed to post
the six to one, and I'm in bed and i
feel like I'm dying, and I call my friend, I'm like,
I can't post today, And he was the one preaching
to me, you have to be inconsistent. If you're going
to go all in on this, you have to do it,
I get up. I make the video almost stuffy. The
lighting's bad. I'm like leaning up behind the poster. That
video does one point two million views overnight, and that's

(04:30):
me talking about my time being in solitary for nearly
six months, the one thing I hated talking about prison.
All of that would turn out to be the thing
that I was destined to become all because of that
one video. Simultaneously, producer at MTV watches that video, reaches
out to me that week, and now I have five
thousand followers going on ten thousand on TikTok. They want

(04:52):
to cast me in a new dating show. I was like, great,
this is my big break.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Oh shit.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
I went to pre I started a nightclub, I went
to prison. I did six months of solitary confinement. Will
you be on the dating show? What kind of fucking
dating shows?

Speaker 4 (05:10):
They wanted?

Speaker 3 (05:11):
They wanted to make it different, they wanted to make
Their pitch was it's like a Survivor type of dating
show out in Europe on some whatever. And then I
would go away for a few months and I just
got my passport back from the Feds after ten years.
So I figured, Wow, this is my big break.

Speaker 4 (05:26):
So you know what I do.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
Before even the first interview with them, I go to
my boss and said, I'm putting in my two weeks.
I'm going on a dating show. I ended up getting
ghosted by the producer and that never ended up happen.
It happened, never happened. You quit the foods? Yeah, all right,
So that's the gist of it. Let's just start with this.
You were in solitary confinement for six months? What was

(05:48):
that like? How did you get into solitary confinement?

Speaker 2 (05:52):
Break that down?

Speaker 3 (05:53):
So the prison stories are probably the funniest thing you'll
ever hear out of my mouth, and that's why people
love it on TikTok. My first prison I was sentenced
to was Fort Dix in New Jersey, the old Army
barracks that converted into a prison. The rooms are open rooms.
There's no locks on the doors. It's a big unit,
a big building, three floors high. On the ground floor,

(06:14):
there's a TV room with every all the inmates shared
different TVs. Ones for sports, ones for you know whatever,
once for movies. People have assigned shares. There's a pool
table and then there's different showers like an army barracks,
like a communal area. And in these rooms are six
bunks with two men on each bunk, and so there's
twelve man rooms now at.

Speaker 1 (06:35):
Almost one hundred percent. Sure my father did a boot camp.
He was at Fort Dicks.

Speaker 3 (06:40):
Probably a lot of people that listen to my podcast say, hey,
I was at a Fort Dicks at one point. It's
still a training facility. It's just on the other side,
I believe. Okay, good, no no worries. And what ends
up happening is there's a lot of cell phones in
federal prison and it's crazy. Now Oranges and New Black
does not do it justice. This is range is a
New Black on steroids. And I remember the first time

(07:03):
going on Facebook in federal prison. This was after I
got through the system of transport and everything, and I
was at my designated spot. You could go to anyone
in that building and say I want to sell phone,
and they're going to charge you. At that time, there
are like twenty five hundred bucks. Now they're probably more.
And we were just talking about in the car on
the way here. Boost Mobile is the carrier everyone uses

(07:23):
because it's not traceable. That's probably the only reason why
boost mobile is still in business. So there's no iPhones
because you can't charge with the iPhone plugs. Everyone converts
the android plugs, put them in the ceiling lights and
the fan lights and stuff, and they convert it. And
they use the little MP three players that you could buy,
you know, the ones at bed, bathroom beyond or whatever
for twenty bucks. They sell those to the inmates for

(07:45):
one hundred and twenty bucks. Wow, the prison system does.
So they convert those into chargers. It's a whole system.
Anything you could think of. Guys are making, you know,
liquor with stingers that they're heating up with extension cording.
So it's like an extension court stripped out that you
used to heat up water.

Speaker 2 (08:01):
Got you.

Speaker 4 (08:01):
Oh we have microwaves too, but they use that for liquor.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
Gotcha.

Speaker 3 (08:05):
Anyways, there's cell phones. Back to why I was in
the shoe and our room gets raided one day and
these are raids happen all the time. They're looking for contraband,
and they end up finding a couple cell phones in
the room. Well, a couple of weeks before this raid,
we thought it was funny to wrestle and get it
on video in this room. So they break into it,

(08:27):
the detective bureau inside the prison breaks into it. There's
rumors that they send phones off to the FBI. Whatever happens.
They got into this phone and there was a video
of me like getting choked out on the floor wrestling
with another inmate and I'm like squealing, but we were
just wrestling for fun. But I'm like squealing and I'm
like this little I was chubby at the time.

Speaker 4 (08:46):
I was probably like two sixty two seventy.

Speaker 3 (08:48):
I'm squealing on the floor of my little Harry Potter
round glasses. We called those the Chomo three thousands in
prison because all the chomos wore those glasses.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
Well, now tell the people, oh what a chow. I
learned what a chomo was from watching your videos.

Speaker 3 (09:03):
So a chomo is h child molester, sex offender. For
Fort Dix is one of the largest federal prisons that
house sex offenders. Wow, that's also where the guy that
was a part of the pharmaceutical thing went.

Speaker 4 (09:17):
Yes, yep, he went there. All right, I gotta stay.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
On topic here, because in federal prison they have chomo's yep.

Speaker 3 (09:26):
And I was labeled as a chomo because you the
way you look, because the way I.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Love, I mean no disrespect ian.

Speaker 1 (09:31):
Even if you had never gone to prison, you'd have
that like you have that disposition, that look especially had
the round glasses and it's one hundred and seventy degrees.
You got the black shirt on anyway, So all right,
all right, so go ahead, and I want to come
back to the Cholmo's and being housed with them and
what their lives are like because on the Iron Rack
Port Cereal podcast, I talk about, you know, sex offenders,

(09:56):
rapists and all that stuff because I had heard a
friend of mine who worked whatever, he was a fed
he talked about when he was first a police officer,
somebody had gotten raped in prison and they found him
passed out with a wonderbread bag hanging out of his
ass to help safe sex. So the wonderbrid bag and
i'llive oil treatment is what I call it on the

(10:16):
imrap Port Stereo podcast.

Speaker 4 (10:18):
That is crazy.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
That's just I mean, it's it is what it is.
At least they were practicing safe sex. Anyway, go ahead.

Speaker 3 (10:24):
So they raided this room and they find the phones,
they find that video. I got called to the SIS,
his office, the Lieutenants Complex, which if you're getting called
the lieutenants.

Speaker 4 (10:31):
Complex never a good thing.

Speaker 3 (10:33):
And they showed me the video and they placed me
under arrest. Basically, they handcuffed me. They shackle you, and
they bring you to the solitary. And they wrapped up
most of the guys in the room where they found
the bed that they found the phone on anyone else
in the video, and they were like, do you need
protective custody? And they because they thought I was getting

(10:54):
like attacked in this. So I'm in the shoe because
they labeled me as protective custody and normally you would
check in to be in protective custody. But because they
saw this video, and I was like, no, yea.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
They saw the video that it was posted on Facebook.

Speaker 4 (11:07):
No, they saw it on the phone camera.

Speaker 3 (11:08):
Role guys do go live from Facebook and all that
kind of which is a whole trip. Yeah, okay, so
go ahead, and so then then what happens. They bring
me to solitary. And this is what is like what
it's like in the movies. You're in a cell all day.
It's a small, tiny, you know, room maybe five by five,
I don't know, whatever the thing is. There's a toilet,
you're listening to your bunk mate. You know, shit, pee,
you're smelling it. Everything stainless in there. Two sometimes three.

(11:31):
They'll put a mat on the floor when it's overcrowded.
The only person five by five, Yeah, the are you serious?
It could be a little bigger, maybe five by eight.
I don't know what the exact spects like.

Speaker 2 (11:39):
You you're in like this close?

Speaker 4 (11:41):
Yeah, holy shit, it's close.

Speaker 3 (11:44):
You have nothing. All you got is a book. The
book cart comes around once a week. It's torture. Basically,
if you get in there on a Tuesday and the
book cart came Monday, you're not getting a piece of
an article to read until that following Monday, unless your
bunk mate has something. And they would house me in
shoe with all the sex offenders that would go to
the shoe because they figured I'm like a white sex

(12:06):
offender looking guy that would get along with them. Funny
story when I was in the shoe in Philadelphia, when
I eventually got transported, there was a sex offender ring
going on at Fort Dix. The FBI sent an undercover
agents and guys that were already serving ten to fifteen
years for sex crimes. Were you know, trading and selling
kiddie porn on it a smuggledon iPad and SD cards.

(12:29):
FBI goes in, does a sting someone's working under cover.
They bust these guys, send them to Philadelphia. They end
up bunking me with one of the guys that was
on an administrative hold there that was on trial for
And I didn't find out after spending a month with
him till after what he was there for. And he
ended up getting like another twenty years on a sentence.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Hold on, man, hold on, Hey.

Speaker 4 (12:51):
This could be a movie with all these crazy stories.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
One hundred percent.

Speaker 1 (12:56):
Wait a second, So when you were in there with
the guy who turned out to be a sex offender,
is it customary to ask people what they're in prison for?
Is that like a common thing, like, hey, my name's
E and my name is Mike. Is like you know
you see in TV in the music? What are you
in here for? How quick does that come up in
your experience? So that what I would learn.

Speaker 3 (13:16):
I'll tell you the first time that I learned about
that my first day at Fort Dix. I went to
the lunch the lunch room and it's a big, giant
like gymnasium type feeling and there's square tables like you're
in college or in high school, and the lunch tables,
and there's a nice buffet like you're going through the lines,
you're getting food. I'm like, this is great because I

(13:37):
was at a detention center mcc Brooklyn or MDC Brooklyn,
the Metropolitan Detention Center for a month before then, and
then I get moved here my designated location, and I'm
in lunch, the lunch line. It was dinner time. Get
my tray of food. They have a salad bar which
was nice tomatoes, onions, one or two types of dressing,
and then a little dessert bar. It was a jello

(13:58):
or a pudding. I grabbed my right and I go
and sit down at a table full of white guys
because I figured that's I knew no one, just the
guys that were off the bus. One of the guys
that was on the bus was black. He went to
the black table. I'm just figuring because up until this time,
I'd only ever watched Orange as a new Black.

Speaker 2 (14:14):
So that's your only Oranges white, that's the only you watch.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
Ever never watched penitentially nothing that that's what makes us crazy.

Speaker 4 (14:21):
I never expected to ever go to jail.

Speaker 3 (14:23):
I was shit, and when I was at the prison camp,
I would watch Orange Is the New Black on my
bunk on a contraband cell phone. Anyways, I go and
sit down.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
Like Shank redemptionh bad boys showing pen. I saw bad
boys with a no not fucking WILLI Smith and more
like it's it's it's it's twenty eight, okay. So I
put the trade down at this table and I sit down.
I'm excited because this is my first real food in
a while, because I've been in shitty like county jail
type food. And I sit down, table stops talking and

(14:52):
I'm still eating.

Speaker 2 (14:53):
How big is the table?

Speaker 1 (14:54):
Long, long rectangle? Probably twelve guys at the table Shaw
Shank Redemption had that in there, go ahead diagonal for me.

Speaker 3 (14:59):
A cross looks up at me and he says you, hey, you,
And I'm looking around like behind me, I'm eating, eating
my pudding, jello whatever it was, and he's looking at me,
and I finally realized he's looking at me, and I'm
like yeah, and then he's like, you can't sit here,
and I'm like, what do you mean I can't sit here?

(15:19):
You know, like I'm looking around. I didn't say it
out loud, but I'm like, white guys here.

Speaker 4 (15:23):
You know I'm white.

Speaker 3 (15:24):
I figured that was the only thing I knew about prison.
And he was like looking around and any points I'm
looking around, and any points, he's like, you belong over there.
And I look around and it's a table of old
guys like no next, like turkey next, kind of round
glasses and they're smiling like like I'm fresh prey looking

(15:45):
at me. And this is the sex offender table. The
federal prisons like this low have designated tables that if
you're a sex offender you have to sit there. If
you're a rat, you have to sit over there. That's
where he was inferring, and I said, listen, I think
think you got the wrong guy. I'm here for fraud.
And he looks at me and he's like, that's what
they all say. And then that's when they proceeded to

(16:07):
explain that you have to show your paperwork and do
all of these things. You have to get your sentencing
transcript to show you're not a rat and you're not
a sex offender. And I said, great, I'll have that
by next week. I'll call my lawyer. He said, sure,
but get the fuck off the table.

Speaker 4 (16:21):
And you know what I did. I had two options.

Speaker 3 (16:23):
I could either, you know, assert my dominance and try
to fight him or whatever, or I could go sit
at the table. A young twenty one year old white
kid who has never been in prison before it got
his ass up and sat at that table. Most embarrassing
day of my life.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
Wow a.

Speaker 1 (16:39):
Podcast?

Speaker 2 (16:54):
Okay, okay, all right. I knew this was going to
be challenging. That's why I was talking to you beforehand.

Speaker 1 (17:01):
I knew it's going to challenge you because there's a
lot to a lot a lot of follow up questions
here and I'm not going to be able to get
to them all.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
First of all, before we go, where can people find
your stuff?

Speaker 3 (17:11):
So if they go to ianbik dot com, I have
a pretty big YouTube presence, and then you know, like Spotify,
Apple Locked In with the en big podcast. I focus
more now on other people's stories, right, but there are
a lot of things like the Vice one. If you
want a ten minute summary of why I went to prison, right,
Wece did a great one. It's got like three million
views if they just search ian Bick on YouTube. It's
not some very stuff and ian Bik on TikTok is great.

Speaker 2 (17:32):
Are you on Instagram?

Speaker 4 (17:33):
Yeah, I'm on you gotta hearing with the follow man.

Speaker 2 (17:35):
Yeah, I didn't know that. I don't see your stuff
on intu anyway.

Speaker 1 (17:38):
All right, so dominates sex offend look before we go,
because I'm on the sidetrack. When you say sex offenders
everything from what to what.

Speaker 3 (17:49):
Guys that have physically assaulted children or people under eighteen, Wow,
that have worked their way down at the low it
could be violent crimes there if they have twenty years
or less, they can't to a camp, which is the
next level, but they could be at a low.

Speaker 4 (18:03):
Guys.

Speaker 3 (18:03):
I met a lot of guys that I really felt
for in some instances where they would do something like
texting a girl that they didn't realize so on their
side of the story that was underage in a different state,
and they would send a picture, the girl would send
them a picture or their friend. I met guys where
their friends sends them something and that implicates them and
they didn't know, and they'd get five years because that's

(18:25):
what they do. They hit you with that paperwork and
it's a federal indictment. They said, you know, plead guilty,
and most people in America don't have the money to
even fight that or get a public defender or anything
like that, and they take the first deal they get to.
The worst is what to The worst I would say
is like the really sexual assaulting And.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
No one wants to say, I'm in jail for sexual assault.
I'm in jail for you know, any sort of level
of rape. How do you How do the other prisoners
find out that they're in there for that they have
to they just everybody knows it.

Speaker 3 (18:56):
That's well, you know, you have corrupt guards that will
tell people what they're there for, that will tell other
people like, hey, he's no good. Some of the guys
I talked to on my podcast, you hear about the
penitentiaries where that a sex offender can't walk the yard
they get on there that people find out they're a
sex offender, they're gonna get stabbed or shanked or sent
to the shoe. But at this low, it's kind of

(19:17):
These sex offenders weren't assaulted. They were just treated differently
because there's so many of them. And no one wants
to leave a low because it's a good it's a
sweet spot. But you would see these sex offenders on
the yard playing dungeons and dragons, pretending like they're Harry
Potter with like a wand like dueling. They would work
in the library. Everyone knew the sex offender spot was
the library. I remember going the library one time because

(19:38):
I like to read, and I was reading and I
got past a note one day while I'm sitting there
by this you know, older gentleman glasses, the typical Chomo look.
And he gives me this note and I open it
and he said, I'm here for sex crimes. Are you
here for sex crimes? Meet me at such and such
place at seven o'clock if you want to talk. That's

(19:59):
what he said to And I went and I flushed
that note down the toilet and never went back to
that library again, because you could get a bad reptis
by associating them with them, and there would be rules
like if there was a sex offender that lived in
your room, they were cleaning the floor every day, they were,
you know, mopping the place, keeping it tidy, and they
weren't allowed in the room only other to sleep, and

(20:21):
that's it.

Speaker 4 (20:22):
Then they had to leave for the day.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
They know the rule.

Speaker 3 (20:24):
Yep, there's special places for them to sit in the
TV room back of the room. There's no high priority,
but people do business with them because they would be
the ones that do legal paperwork, or they would have
a knitting business and they would make pillows. So people
still break bread with them in these lows because they
have to. But they're treated at the bottom of the barrel.
And when you say low, you mean low. When you
say lows, what does that mean? This is a low

(20:46):
security feederal security. There's still a fence, right, but it's
people that have twenty years or less on their sentence
and they've worked their way down or got sentence there.
The next level is a camp, which is where I
went to after Okay, So how did you ian bick
one up in prison in the first place? Now that's
a story. Okay, So basically it goes back to high school.

(21:06):
And I was always a kid in elementary school that
was like bullied and whatnot.

Speaker 4 (21:10):
Was a nerd.

Speaker 3 (21:10):
They called Twinkie, they called chubby, they called chubster, they
called me all these names. And so my parents yanked
me out of public school and sent me to private
school and Montessori school in Danbury, Connecticut, where life was different.
You really learn your independence and Montessori school because it's
fourth through eighth grade in one classroom, but there's only
like fifteen kids, so there's like two fourth graders, one

(21:32):
eighth grade or whatever. There's a bunny hopping around the room,
there's turtles, and you're sitting like crisscross apple sauce in
the room doing your work. So I learned independence. And
I was a theater kid growing up too. I love theater.
I love the stage. They would have me dressed as
Milton Burrow and the woman's wig and the outfit and
the high heels and the lipstick, and I love that.
I craved the attention, and that took away from getting bullied.

(21:56):
I always wanted to be liked and be out there.
So eighth grade they put me back into public school
so I can adjust before going to high school reconnect
with friends. And I was a kid that wanted to
fit in, you know. I wanted to be the skater
and the stoner, even though I wasn't that. I would
fake hit weed and pretend to sell weed and carry
around a skateboard and had the long hair because and

(22:18):
I had highlights in my hair because that's what everyone
was doing. And I also wanted to be different at
the same time too. I wanted to stand out but
be different. So everyone's saying you have to get good
grades in middle school, to get into good classes in
high school, to get through a good college. I said,
screw that. I got all offs. I was a kid
that failed gym for not changing. I turned middle school

(22:39):
into a business. I was selling candy out of my backpack,
and energy drinks and packs of gum. I wore Hollister
shirts that said this is what happens when you party naked.
They suspended me for that. I wore flip flop So
I was this weird kid in a way, but I
like to stand out and cause trouble. I got to
high school and they put me on this naughty list
that says kids to watch out for when you get

(23:00):
to this school. So I was like, okay, you know
I'm on this naughty list. I want to be different
in that aspect. So I went and became top seven
in my class for academics. Turned everything around. I'm on
a good straight and arrow. I'm in the school theater.
The first year was Anny, Get your Gun. Did theater
all four years, and I'm you know, I'm not popular,

(23:20):
but I'm a nerd. I turned into a nerd. I'm
wearing the nice khaki shorts and a nice shirt, a
polo shirt every day.

Speaker 4 (23:26):
And now this is where things take a turn. So
sophomore year of high school, I grew up.

Speaker 3 (23:30):
We were just talking about in this Jewish community called
Lake Wabika in Danbury, Connecticut. Okay, my parents' house was
on the lake, and there's a board of directors, a president,
a vice president, etc. And my parents got me a
golf cart when I was sixteen. Well, the community made
up a rule after I got that golf cart that
kids cannot drive golf carts. And then they made up

(23:51):
a rule about paintballing, and they made up all these
rules targeted towards me, just me.

Speaker 4 (23:55):
I was the only one doing it. Me and my
friends that I'd invite over.

Speaker 3 (23:59):
Me and my best friend decide to get back at
these board of directors and we take insulating foam, you know,
the spray foam that you use at your house. Yes,
And my friend said, if we put it on the
locks of their car, it'll just keep them from getting
into their car. Well, the phone ends up dripping down
the sides of their car. And we wore like ski masks.
That night, we're driving around the golf car thinking we're

(24:21):
so slick, and we phooned their cars. Next day, it
drips all the way down the side of the house.
Everyone knew we were the troublemakers. They called me the
black sheep of the neighborhood. So the cops came to
my house. My dad thought his son would at least
be smart enough to not have the evidence on the property,
so he said, sure, officer, you could search our garage.

(24:41):
The officer opens the garage and there are the spray phone.
There was no look, there was no searching was right there.

Speaker 2 (24:46):
It was right there.

Speaker 3 (24:47):
And I had tpeed our house at night, and I
was trying to tell the cop, hey, look, our house
got hit with toilet paper. And simultaneously they're interrogating my
friend and the cop tells my friend at his house
that I had snitched on him. So they did that
whole thing, and I was like, dude, I called them
after you never watched Criminal Minds or CSI or anything
like that.

Speaker 4 (25:04):
This is what they do.

Speaker 3 (25:05):
And he was grew up watching MythBusters and stuff, so
we had no experience in this, and so we got caught,
and I got sentence to community service. Okay, and this
is where this night, this whole day of you know,
me getting caught. That's why we're meeting right now.

Speaker 2 (25:22):
You and me, Me and you.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Okay, they would not be here if it wasn't for
that tee being thing, because that set a domino effect
to my whole life. Okay, get sentence to community service.
And here I am a kid that needs to stand out,
needs to do something different. I couldn't just go to
a local homeless shelter or volunteer anywhere. I got this
idea to start this whole organization. I call it Fight
for the Homeless. And we're selling the live Strong bracelets

(25:46):
that say fight for the Homeless on them for a
dollar apiece. My dad buys me a few hundred bracelets,
and we end up selling two or three thousand bracelets.
Local newspapers calling me this whiz kid, local sophomore in
high school. I'm fifteen at the time, starts this charity.
Everything's great. I'm in the spotlight and I just start
running with it. I plan a school dance, and the

(26:07):
school dance goes to me throwing house parties. We're throwing
three or four hundred people house parties at my parents' house.
We're selling liquor on the patio for you know, solo
cups five dollars a solo cup. Where the kids are
taking out the row boats and the canoes and skinny
dipping at just all this crazy shit's going on.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
Time out? Where is your fucking parents when you're throwing
parties and alcohol and row boats and canoes and jugglers
and magicians, And where's your parents when this is happening.

Speaker 3 (26:36):
So freshman year of high school, they let me throw
the cast party, which is at the end of the
school year.

Speaker 4 (26:41):
It's like three or four hundred people.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
And they got this party ten because my dad's in
the catering business, so I was accustomed to that. Okay,
we threw up a cast party. Everything was great, you know,
we had a dance floor party. Everything was great. So
when I start throwing house parties, I pitch it to
them as, hey, it's just going to be forty people. Well,
you know, any parent that has a kid and school
knows it's never forty people. And the first party had

(27:03):
like two or three hundred kids that showed up, and
there were seniors in the class that worked with my dad.
I had them going upstairs making sure my parents were good,
that there was like wine, food for them. They were
upstairs and I was just making sure, you know, everything
was good. And the thing with me was I was
never a party kid. I was very introverted. I wasn't
the one hooking up with the girls. I was a

(27:23):
kid that got high. I never did drugs. I got
high off of planning events and seeing that spotlight and.

Speaker 2 (27:29):
Making the money.

Speaker 3 (27:30):
At that time it wasn't much, but that would come
and when the night after a party ends, it's like
doing a show that highs over and you're looking forward
to the next one. You're only as good as your
last show. So that would be something that reoccurs over
and over again. And I worked my way from house
parties to renting a local nightclub, this famous nightclub in
Connecticut called Tuxedo Junction, which was the equivalent to Toad's

(27:53):
Place in New Haven. They booked Oasis all these big
bands back in the day. And that's where my business starts.
I call myself, this is where it's at productions. And
because if my parties were going to be where it
was at for the night and the first party, two
hundred and fifty people, then seven hundred and fifty, then
twelve hundred, then fifteen hundred, then two thousand, and I'm

(28:15):
sixteen years old making ten thousand dollars in profit in
one night, once a month, throwing the biggest teen parties
in Connecticut. We're pulling from people in New York, people
all around Connecticut. They're paying just cash. And you know,
I'd call like the Christmas Rave or we did a
paint party. I went to Michael's craft store and bought
every washable paint off the shelf, mixed it all together.

Speaker 4 (28:35):
We're doing squirt guns. It was crazy.

Speaker 3 (28:38):
This is like I idolized like Scooter Braun at that time,
because that's how he got started. And I thought I
was on top of the world and that this thing
was going to go and to make that kind of money,
I'm spending it on a car, I'm taking my friends
out to dinner whatever. I always put it back into
like my brand. And at that point I never knew
at the time was that I was a good marketer.

(28:59):
I was a terrible businessman, but I was a great marketer.
And that's something I would figure out long term.

Speaker 2 (29:04):
Okay, so then what happens.

Speaker 3 (29:08):
So, like all good things, they come to an end,
and the nightclub owners in that area were starting to
get greedy and they would rent it at the clubs
out because they'd get a rental fee to everyone that
wanted to be the next d in Bick. So everyone
wanted to start doing teen parties because they see the
money in it. So the clubs got you just spoke
of yourself in the third party. Yeah, and that's an area. Yeah, yeah,

(29:29):
everyone want at that time period. Everyone wanted to be
the next d in Big Yeah at that time period.
And what ends up happening is that the market gets
over oversaturated and the parties die out. Okay, and I
want to take things to the next level. How old
are you at this point, seventeen? I want to take
things to the next level. I want to start doing concerts.

(29:52):
At that time, Mac Miller was blowing up, Big Sean
was blowing up. I had the vision to book one
of those acts at the Connectic Western Connecticut State University.
That was in Dan Barry, who did you book? We
ended up booking Big Sean.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (30:07):
Before that, my first ever rapper I ever worked with
was Asher Roth was the very first one. We'll get
him for a charity event. Okay, cool dude. And we
booked Big Sewan next, okay. And what other rappers did
you wind up booking. I've booked Big Sean, twenty one, Savage,
oh shit, Chief Keif, Tiger, Little Yachtie. I think I've
worked with a ton of rappers.

Speaker 2 (30:27):
Do you have any crazy rapper stories?

Speaker 3 (30:29):
Yeah, Chief Keif fucked me over out of a lot
of money. Never showed up to an event. We sold
the show out at Toad's place in New Haven and
he ghosted us, missed all his flights, couldn't find him,
and the next day he sends out a tweet, sorry, Connecticut,
wasn't the promoter's fault, see you. Soon tried to sue him,
never got the money. I think he settled on a

(30:50):
back end with one of the other promoters on the
show years later. But in my eyes, he fucked me
over and he owes me the money. That was one
of the crazy stories. I remember paying forty thousand dollars
for Taiga and he wouldn't even take a picture with us,
and he just wouldn't even talk to us, and he
needed The riders are crazy like with what they want
with the champagne and this and that. Twenty one Savage

(31:11):
paid twenty thousand dollars for him to do an hour set.
He does five minutes. This club's packed, everyone's here, fifteen
hundred people. He does five minutes, drops some mic and
leaves and we're like, dude, what the fuck? And he
just pulls off in a sprinter van and that was it.
Goes to the hotel that we booked him at, the Laquinta,
and in sweets because there's not like nice hotels in

(31:32):
Danbarry and there was an outback attached to it. I
get a call the next morning from the hotel saying,
you're banned from this hotel for life because the group
you book last I tried breaking in to the outback
and cause damage to the door. It wasn't him directly,
but it was his posse that got drunk and was
trying to get into it. Shit, dude, But it's not

(31:53):
just the hip hop. I've worked with edm I was
an DM club, so I've worked with the Chainsmokers. I
owed them twenty five thousand dollars for like five months.
At one point, Steve Ioki Adventure Club, These big, big
names were coming to Danbury. And that's what made this
time period so crazy because while I'm running this nightclub,
I'm also under investigation by the FBI, arrested by the FBI,

(32:16):
and then I'm on a month long trial against the
United States government while owning this nightclub for your So,
they had investigated me for fraud and money laundering. They
said that I ran a Ponzi scheme as a teenager.
This is before I owned the nightclub. They said I
ran a Ponzi scheme and it was an accident, when

(32:37):
when I look at it, this is like an accidental
Ponzi scheme because what I was doing was I would
take loans from individuals. I structured them as loans, and
me and my friend got this idea to start this
electronic business. And we would say, hey, Mike, you know,
give us ten thousand dollars and we'll give you fifty
percent rate to return in thirty days. Because we're buying

(32:57):
these electronics beats by Dre for like fifty bucks and
selling it for four hundred. The electronics turned out to
be fake, which you know, which, yeah, anyone could have
figured that out early on, but we didn't know that
at the time, and now all of a sudden, all
these investors or lenders are giving me hundreds of thousands
of dollars. I was eighteen years old, decided not to
go to college. At this point, I have like six

(33:17):
hundred thousand dollars in as well as Fargo bank account.
And what do kids do with six hundred thousand dollars?
We made dumb investments like I put it into my
first nightclub. I've owned two nightclubs in my day. Put
it one hundred grand into a nightclub where every contractor
you could ever think of took advantage of me.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
They do it.

Speaker 1 (33:34):
They do it to kids, they do it to grown ups.
Contractors are motherfuckers.

Speaker 4 (33:38):
It's fucked.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
And put it into some shoe company other things, big
Bowler brand. Uh no, no, not Big Baller. You know
Ben Baller Actually I know Ben. He dm me when
the HBO Max documentary came out. Yeah, he was really nice.
He's like, dude, you're gonna make it one day, like
just keep going, yeah, yeah, yeah, So all these things,
and yeah, we spent twenty grand on Jetski's. As I figured,

(34:00):
companies get company cars. Why can't we have company jet skis,
and this was an eighteen year old's mentality. Of course,
we took trips, we went to a strip club, we
did all these crazy things. Anyways, I was banking on
with this money. I would take a loan from you
to pay off another loan, not for me, not for you.

Speaker 1 (34:18):
Yeah, I ain't loan as shit, but go ahead, but
somebody like me hypothetically, I'm not loaning you or anybody
else jet shit.

Speaker 4 (34:25):
So in my eyes, I was eighteen, I couldn't. I
had no credit.

Speaker 3 (34:29):
So I've heard of people like refinancing credit cards, taking
one loan from a bank to pay off another loan.
So why can't I take one loan from one person
to pay off another loan. Well, apparently that's a Ponzi scheme.
And when you're taking money from one person to pay
off another and no profits are producing, I was bankrolling
on these string of concerts that so I was promising

(34:50):
people short rate of returns on investments that were going
to take months to pay off, and I was keeping
the cash flow going by taking on new loans.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
How did they wind up catching on to you, eight
ten year old? It's not millions and kazillions of dollars.
You're not Bernie Madoff. How did they get their eyes
on you?

Speaker 3 (35:06):
So by December of twenty thirteen, this is six months
after I started taking investments, every single show that we
had booked had bombed drastically. Like I lost one hundred
grand on The Tiger Show in one night. Chief Keith
was another, you know, forty to fifty sixty grand. I
lost everything that could go wrong. Had it been reversed,
had I made money on every show, I would have
been rich. But I wasn't, and I lost money on everything.

(35:29):
And so one of the kids and invested two hundred
and fifty grand that he had from a settlement with
New York Sports Club he had lost vision in his eye,
goes to the police. Now the Danburry local police, their
eyes are lighting up because when they see one investor
for two hundred and fifty grand, they think there's millions.
And there's rumors flowing around that I'm in the drug
business because I own a nightclub, and you know, Danburry's

(35:50):
putting me.

Speaker 4 (35:50):
As a staple kid.

Speaker 3 (35:52):
So the detective, like you see Wolf of Wall Street, Yes,
it was that scenario where that one agent detective latches
onto the case and is relentless.

Speaker 4 (36:01):
That was my story.

Speaker 3 (36:02):
And when they accused me of being a young Bernie
made off, I look at them, I'm like, who's Bernie madeoff?
They didn't teach us that in school. It was too
recent and recent times, and I google it. I'm like,
holy shit, this is exactly what I did. But it
wasn't intentional. I never meant to defraud anyone or scam anyone.
Like the whole thing was an accident. Had everything worked out,

(36:24):
I would have paid them. And by the time the
investigation starts, I have nothing, not a cent to my name.
I'm one point three million dollars in debt with the interest.
The out of pocket is like four to eighty, but
with the interest, because everyone kept rolling over and over.
I owe money to biker gangs. I owe money to
drug dealers because I'm borrowing money to pay off other people.
I'm gambling all this time.

Speaker 2 (36:44):
And you're sober?

Speaker 4 (36:45):
Are you are? You never drank, never, never did drugs.
I always wanted to keep that okay.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
And then so how did it get to the point
where they catch you, you get arrested, so forth and
so on, and then like when do we hear the
idea like I might go to it.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
I never thought I was going to go to prison
until the day my bond got revoked after trial, after
I was convicted on everything, after everything, I always thought
that I was going to get probation, and rewind that
for a second. After the local police start their investigation,
months go on and I get subpoena to the Department
of Banking in Connecticut. I never knew we had a

(37:21):
department of banking. So I go there, no lawyer, eighteen
year old kid about to turn nineteen, and I'm like,
I'm gonna clear this whole thing up. I bring all
my bank records, I bring every contract, I bring a
list to everyone's name with telephone numbers, addresses, everything, and
I tell them the whole story for six hours on record,
no lawyer. Afterwards, they say, hey, there's these guys we
want to meet with you. I go into this room

(37:44):
and it's a room in this office building. Two guys
with gray suits come on, just like in the movies.
They come, they sit down, they show me their badges
and they say they're postal inspectors, and I'm kind of
like laughing in my head. I'm like, what the hell
is a postal inspector, and these are federal agents that
have guns that investigate like mail fraud and whatnot. And

(38:05):
they interrogated me and I told them everything, and they
never said I need a lawyer.

Speaker 4 (38:09):
They never did any of that. They end up handing
me a letter at the end of the scene.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
You're watching the wrong movies, because every fucking show you
can watch, I mean the Simpsons, every show they like,
you need a lawyer.

Speaker 4 (38:21):
But this shows my intention and mindset at the time.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
I understand.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
But just because you're like, I saw this in the movies,
but you didn't see the part about it I need
a lawyer.

Speaker 3 (38:28):
Yeah, well I didn't. They don't show the lawyers in
Orange is the Dude Black.

Speaker 1 (38:31):
That's the only thing I watched the season three episode seventeen.
I think they showed the ways. So they give me
a target letter. And that's the scariest thing you'll ever
get in your life. It says United States Department of Justice.
I just heard the term target letter because of Trump. Yeah,
he got that fucking So target letters are scary. Scariest
thing you'll ever say.

Speaker 4 (38:51):
Why. It's got the gold seal on it, you know.

Speaker 3 (38:54):
It says United States Department of Justice, and it says
Federal Bureau of Investigation. It says, dear mister Ian Bick,
you know you are under investigation. You're officially a target
in this investigation for US whatever all these codes and
then it's signed by all these agents, the US attorney.
It's crazy. There's so much power in this one paper.
So I immediately when I left that room, called the lawyer.

(39:16):
I searched on Google best lawyer for criminal defense in Connecticut.

Speaker 4 (39:21):
I lawyered up.

Speaker 3 (39:22):
I then end up we get this thing called a
reverse profer. Where a profer is where you sit with
the government and you snitch or you tell a reverse
profers when you hear everything that they have on you.
So as me and my dad and my lawyer go
to the federal building in New Haven, Connecticut, and we're
sitting at this big long conference table and they have
four FBI agents, four IRS agents, two US attorneys, and

(39:43):
a bunch of interns and then the room reporter all
for this one thing. And it's me and my dad
and the lawyer and they're talking about how it was
the next Bernie made Off and all these crazy things.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (39:53):
And they offered me a deal of like four years
I got. The deal that they offered me was more
than what I would have gotten had I gone to trial.
The deal that they offered you was more than what
I got after trial. The deal of four years was
more than what you got after trial after losing a trial.
Half the count, which was how much I ended up
getting thirty six months and one year house arrest.

Speaker 4 (40:15):
But my guidelines were eight to twelve years.

Speaker 1 (40:18):
Shit.

Speaker 3 (40:19):
And that's only because I pissed off the judge because
I was secretly while I was on supervisor release going
to Empire City and Yonkers because you can't be eighteen
to gamble in Connecticut, and I was about nineteen or twenty.
I'm going to Empire to play backer at and I
would turn five hundred into twenty grand to help pay
off some of these artists I had, like wime CIA,

(40:40):
like blowing up my email, like demanding money so I
didn't get blacklisted in the agency because I needed it
to produce shows. And I'm going to this Caseino. I
remember days I'd be gambling when a couple thousand run
over the Bank of America where CIA had, you know,
their account there, and I'd deposit money and I'd run
back and play some more and it was dude, it
was crazy and this was my life every day while

(41:03):
running this nightclub that was attracting people from all over
the East Coast to.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
This ant podcast. When did you get sentenced and how
much time did you get sentenced for?

Speaker 4 (41:27):
So this is October twenty sixteen.

Speaker 3 (41:29):
I'm twenty one years old and my bond gets revoked
because my friends that were working with me at the
club reported me the FBI because they wanted to take
the club from me, so they stitched on me. They
knew I was going out of state. That's how they
found out about it. Judge tells me, the party's over,
mister Bick.

Speaker 4 (41:43):
I get remanded into custody, stripped out, shackled, and brought
on this you know, white van.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
Did you know that day was going to happen?

Speaker 3 (41:50):
I knew that day was happening. I didn't think that
I was going to go to jail. I never thought
I was going to go to jail.

Speaker 2 (41:55):
Like you're just thinking somewhere or somehow I'm going to
get out of this.

Speaker 4 (41:58):
Always that was always my mentality.

Speaker 1 (42:00):
He's that good white privilege right there, that's that good
white privilege right there.

Speaker 2 (42:03):
I get it. I know what you're that's that good
white privilege right there.

Speaker 4 (42:07):
But that's not my mindset anymore.

Speaker 2 (42:09):
Of course, of course, I'm just.

Speaker 1 (42:10):
I'm making jokes because I know you're you're lighthearted about
your situation.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
No offense at all. Okay, So slow down when you
say you get shackled and all that stuff, What is that? Like?
What do you remember from that? What's going through your
head when you are going to go to jail for
how long?

Speaker 3 (42:26):
So a month later I would end up getting sentenced
to three years because the government asked for My guidelines
were eight to twelve. The government asked for seven years
at sentencing, and then my lawyer asked for probation or
house arrest because I wrote a big speech to the judge.
I said, listen, I've been in prison for three weeks now,
which I thought was like it took forever months. I
saw a guy get his finger bitten off by another

(42:49):
man for cutting someone in the lunch line, like this
was a bad place. This wasn't a good place, like
when you're in a spot like it's I've never suffered
from claustrophobia or anything like that, but when you get
put into a cell like that and all everything's revoked
and you have no power going from a position of
power in a nightclub or anything in your life, and
that's all taken away from you. Like it's just like

(43:11):
your souls wrenched out from you and spending all that
time and like solitary six months. That shit can make
you crazy, That shit could screw you up, and it's
a real problem that's going on, and that like just
the feeling of getting They make it so you're humili
whatever the word is.

Speaker 4 (43:28):
I can't really relate it.

Speaker 3 (43:29):
Humiliated it you say a lot of worse and like
stripping you out, taking away your first name. Like you
feel like I was treated no different than how the
sex offenders people that touched kids. Like whatever people want
to think of me, you know, for what I did
or what happened, what may or may not have happened,
I was still treated like some of the worst people
in America are treated in that situation. I'm just like

(43:52):
this twenty one year old kid that's going through that.

Speaker 2 (43:55):
So when did you realize you were actually going to
go for three years? And like, how are you?

Speaker 1 (44:01):
You're twenty one, You've never gotten into trouble, like real trouble. Uh,
you know you've never gotten anything serious besides you know,
high school type of bad behavior.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
Shit when you.

Speaker 1 (44:11):
Realize you're getting time in jail, Like what's happening through
your head?

Speaker 2 (44:16):
And what was that first period of being in prison?

Speaker 4 (44:19):
Like, dude, it was scary.

Speaker 3 (44:21):
Like I remember getting sentenced, Like when the judge, so,
you give your speech, Government says their side, defense says
their side. Any you know, victims want to speak anyone else.
I remember seeing my mother, you know, like crying while
she was speaking and sitting in the courtroom and even
like you could hear her cry when I was actually sentenced.
And when the judge takes a break and comes back
and he's he says a whole speech, I'm sure, like

(44:43):
you've seen on TV. Says a whole speech. And then
he says thirty six months. And I'm sitting there like,
how long is thirty six months? Because you don't hear
when you when someone says, hey, i'll see you in
two years, you're not saying i'll see you in twenty
four months, at least in my eyes, absolutely, And I'm
counting for a second, and I don't even and hear
the rest of what's going on. I had to read
that A couple of days later. He lost me at

(45:03):
the thirty six months, and then I realized, holy shit,
three years in prison, a year a house arrest, and
then they're talking about all the conditions I was going
to be on. I had to see a therapist for
a year. I couldn't gamble, I couldn't do all these things.
And I'm like, I can't even think about that right now,
because that's three years from now and no one's telling
me or training me, or I didn't have time to
research how much time you actually do on the three

(45:24):
years or anything. And the second you're handcuffed and let
out of that room, your life changes forever. Because as
much as you pay your lawyer, as much as anyone's
there for you, they can't really be there for you.
Your parents can give you all the love and support
in the world, your friend, you could have all the
money in the world, but once they haul you away,
you have you're on your own.

Speaker 2 (45:43):
That's it.

Speaker 4 (45:44):
You have zero power.

Speaker 1 (45:46):
Man, Okay, this is just a lot. I can't do
your whole life story. So I want to keep asking questions.
I want to jump in this because I've seen you
talk about so many things.

Speaker 4 (45:56):
Now we get to the prison stuff.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
Yeah, what are some of the easiest things that you
personally except besides being a solitary confiner I see, besides like, oh,
besides being solitary confinement for six months, what were some
of the crazy things that you dealt with that you
saw while.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
You were in prison?

Speaker 4 (46:12):
You want an exclusive that I've never told anyone before. Cool.

Speaker 3 (46:15):
So I was at the Oxford prison camp in Wisconsin
and the first weekend I'm there. This is a Friday
night my window. These are four man bunks. Now, Oxford
Prison is a camp, you know Otisville Camp, and that
all the celebrities go to. This is the Otisville but
out in the Midwest. One hundred inmates. There's a dog program.
There's dogs walking around. One security guard to these hundred inmates.

(46:40):
When they call it club fed, this is club fed.
You got the bachi ball court, you got the volleyball court.
You want to play pickleball, There's a pickleball court. There's
a basketball court. There's the track.

Speaker 4 (46:49):
We have a gym.

Speaker 3 (46:51):
The lunch is season like the food season because it's
a cafeteria.

Speaker 4 (46:55):
You know who I did time with there.

Speaker 3 (46:57):
George Papadopoulos from Trump's campaign or whatever was there and
I spent He was there for fourteen days.

Speaker 4 (47:03):
TMZ was outside.

Speaker 3 (47:05):
We had contraband cell phones trying to sell his photos
to TMZ in the library. They didn't bite because he
wasn't there long enough, and then it was old news. Anyways,
my first Friday night there, I'm looking out my window
and there's inmates running across. It's like dusk, like five
or six pm, with garbage bags full of stuff. And

(47:25):
I don't know what this is, and I'm nosy, and
that's something you can't be in prison, is nosy.

Speaker 4 (47:29):
But this is a camp.

Speaker 3 (47:30):
A lot of people are snitches there or whatever, and
they're running in across like the basketball court, and there's
a guy that's looking out inside. There's no cameras at
this camp either, and they're on contraband phones. They're saying,
coast is clear. Another inmate's distracting the guard and the
officers unit. And these guys come in and they go
to another little pot area and they dump these garbage bags.

(47:51):
McDonald's Deep Chicago deep dish, pizza, cell phones, protein powder, shoes, anything,
you name it. Was getting brought in during this time period,
and it's like longest yard where you have the burger
guide giving everyone the burgers to pay everyone off.

Speaker 4 (48:07):
This is what was going on.

Speaker 3 (48:08):
Now here's the exclusive. I would later become one of
these runners that would go across the field and go
through the woods because it was an adrenaline rush. I
didn't need the money. I didn't it was just exciting.

Speaker 4 (48:20):
I was alone. I was in Wisconsin.

Speaker 3 (48:21):
They shipped me, you know, six hundred miles away from
my home because I dated a guard's cousin in the Danbury,
Connecticut prison, and so they put me on con air,
which is another crazy story in itself, and they shipped
me out there and I would become the runner and
I would run through the woods picking up packages. I
was still on the prison grounds, never left the prison grounds,
but inmates parents.

Speaker 4 (48:42):
Would drop off.

Speaker 3 (48:44):
Goods of services or whatever, drop it off there and
I would pick it up and in bulk, in bulk
anything protein powder. Hey, Ian, I want sushi this weekend. Okay,
I have your people set it up. Send me the money.
Boom bit a bing, We're good. I'd run, grab it,
bring it into the prison. Everyone was doing this even
the head orderly that was the assistant, you know whatever,

(49:07):
he was getting things smuggled in.

Speaker 4 (49:09):
Guys would go.

Speaker 3 (49:10):
The visits were so relaxed, you don't get strip searched
on the visits, so your parents would like slide you
a phone. This is all changing now because there was
an incident recently where someone brought a gun in on
a visit.

Speaker 4 (49:22):
It was in the news.

Speaker 3 (49:24):
So the prison systems cracking down, but it poses a
question why we even have camps to begin with. It
is pretty crazy, and there's guys at these camps that
are doing ten years or less. So that was one story,
and I would say the second craziest story is when
the guard assaulted me, like sexually assaulted me, sexually harassed me,
whatever you want to call it, at this prison camp

(49:46):
in the same one, at the same one, and the
prison system covered it up.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
And what was that? How did that happen?

Speaker 3 (49:50):
So this prison had a scratch bakery. Some of the
federal prisons have scratched bakeries where some of the inmates
become bakersackground and food. I had worked in restaurants, my
dad was a caterer. The bakery job opened up, I
became the baker and I would get up at four am.
They like, hit your bunk, you come out and you
go and you bake. Were baking cinnamon buns, muffins, all this.

(50:13):
And my bunk mate was one of the cooks and
bakers there too, so we did it together.

Speaker 4 (50:17):
One morning. This is like six months I have left
on my sentence.

Speaker 3 (50:21):
I get woken up and not him, so I thought
it was weird, but whatever, I went and this officer, tall, skinny,
penis shaped head looking guy always had his pants really
high tucked in, kind of smelled a little bad.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
You know.

Speaker 3 (50:35):
He was the supervising officer because there always is a
guard with you. And this guy would give me extra
meals at the prison show haul. He would let me
skip the line. He would let me smuggle out the
brick Philadelphia cream cheese. Because I was a cheesecake maker,
non baked cheesecakes. I would sell them two dollars a slice.
Best cheesecake you'll ever have. Yours are the prison one.

(50:56):
So with the cream where you got to try it?
What time I'll make you one, okay? And I would
sell that as my hustle. And so he would give
me the real cream cheese, because the commissary cream cheese,
non refrigerated cream cheese is the worst thing you could
ever happen.

Speaker 4 (51:08):
It's like putty or whatever.

Speaker 3 (51:10):
So we're sitting there one day and I'm scooping muff
and mix out of the tub into this thing, and
he's standing next to me and we're talking. He had
taken like a liking to me, like I thought I
as a friend, just talking about whatever, and I'm scooping
the muff and mix, and then all of a sudden,
I feel a little rub on my elbow. It was
his hand, and I looked to the right and he's
like like rubbing it like weirdly, for like thirty seconds

(51:33):
or whatever, and I don't think anything of it.

Speaker 4 (51:34):
I'm like, this has to be an accident. Maybe he
saw something, maybe there was a bug. I don't know.
And I go back to scooping the muff and mix.

Speaker 3 (51:42):
A couple seconds passed by whatever, that hand goes to
my thigh and he's rubbing my thigh a little bit.

Speaker 4 (51:49):
This is weird, and shit, I'm like, I don't know
what to do. There's no camera, it'd be weird.

Speaker 3 (51:54):
Yeah, you just don't do that to someone, especially when
you have an inmate and an officer that complicates things.
No shit, the hand then moves to my ass on
the right cheek. And it's funny to tell it, but
it's a serious thing.

Speaker 1 (52:05):
You know.

Speaker 3 (52:06):
It's scary as fun it is because it just this.
You know, I'm probably twenty two at the time, and
if I hit him, I knew well enough. If I
hit him, I was going in getting five years. And
it's always the inmates word versus the officers, and you
always lose.

Speaker 4 (52:19):
In that scenario.

Speaker 3 (52:20):
And I didn't want to report it at that time
because I didn't want to go back to the shoe.
In these scenarios, they always lock up the inmate into
the shoe, and it's like punishment when you didn't do
anything wrong. You're getting punished after already being punished, right,
And so that happens. I was like, Okay, this is
a one time thing. It's not going to happen again.
I avoided him for a while, said I was sick,

(52:40):
hauled out on a couple shifts, and two weeks a
week or two weeks go by, I'm in the walk
in cooler and normally the walking cooler is always locked
and the prison guard would unlock it and stand outside
because it's very narrow. Well, he unlocks it and comes
in and shuts the door, and it's a very narrow hallway.
So I grabbed the sheet of cook I went to go,

(53:01):
you know, reheat or whatever, bake off, and he forces
me to rub my butt up against his groin area
while I'm trying to sneak out of the walkeet. That
was a final straw, and me and my bunk ended
up reporting it because the whole compound, it's a small compound,
inmates gossip more than a high school girls. Everyone knew
about it. Everyone knew what was going on. People were

(53:21):
coming up to me fist pumping me, saying, yo, bick,
you got to get him to bring in some stuff
for us, this and that. But it felt wrong, like
because I wasn't I didn't want that. I didn't want that,
and I never voiced that to him. But I shouldn't
have had to voice that to him in that scenario.
We reported it, sat down with the lieutenant, the detective
of the prison. They said they weren't going to lock

(53:42):
me up into the shoe because I was short on
my sentence and they could move him to the Medium.
Nothing ever came from it. They did investigations. Whatever I
got out Still to this day, I don't know what happened.
I then go big on social media, have the podcast,
and a couple months ago one of the guards that
work at the Oxford prison camp at the Medium reach

(54:02):
out to me and he's like, hey, was the person
that did this to you?

Speaker 4 (54:06):
Name so and so And I was like, yeah, how
did you know?

Speaker 3 (54:08):
He's like, well, he's been accused of that multiple times
in the past, and he said he hasn't seen him there.
He doesn't work there anymore. But they never followed up
with me. I wrote a letter to the judge, and
the judges is all public record. The judge ordered the
US attorney to look into it and they said it
couldn't be founded or whatever. But if you asked any
inmate that was in that prison with me, they could

(54:28):
tell you that that happened. And then that was a
thing and the system just let it slide and didn't
do anything about it.

Speaker 1 (54:35):
Jesus Christ, And what about there was another story you
talked about on your podcast on Socials about you getting
into a fight or somebody smack and your glasses off
or something like this, and then you referred to what
as the smack in the class.

Speaker 3 (54:53):
Yeah, that one actually went. No Jumper posted that clip
on everywhere and it went viral a couple months ago.
That's what helped blow up the pod cast. So what
happened was this is you remember the cell phone investigation
I was talking about. I was excited that they locked
me up at that point for this protective custody or
whatever you want to call it, because guys are trying
to extort me at this prison compound. This was about

(55:15):
a couple three months into my sentence, and this is
the low security with low security, but they still try
to do the extortion.

Speaker 4 (55:20):
I'll tell you why.

Speaker 3 (55:21):
There were these guys from Baltimore, and Baltimore has a
bad rep in prison, and they are guys that are
known for being like sexual predators. These are guys that
came from a medium and penitentiary, so they work their
way down, and some guys that work their way down
when they hit a low security yard, they still have
that mentality of how they have to operate. They're walking

(55:42):
around with steel rods like they're at a medium or
a high security. They're going with their boots to the
shower where they you wear your boots to the shower
and you leave them outside with your steel rods, so
you're ready to go at a moment's notice. So they
see this kid running around me, and everyone was calling
me mcloven. They gave me that nickname. I've had a

(56:03):
couple nicknames, mcgloven, Squints, Bieber, but the name that stuck
the most was mclovin.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
And shout out to the real mclovin from the movie Superbad. Superbad.

Speaker 3 (56:15):
And what ends up happening is they see this white,
nerdy kid not riding with a car. Instead of gangs,
they're called cars, like the New York Car, East Coast Car, whatever.
And they see me running around. I'm involved in the gambling.
I'm shooting dice, you know, I'm running around with food,
I'm hanging out with everyone. I'm hanging out with the Blacks,
the Mexicans, the whites, whatever. And that's a no no

(56:37):
for what I was doing and where they came from.
So they looked at me as fresh prey. And one
day I'm walking in the hall and the bathroom's right here,
and one guy comes up behind, the other guy comes
from the front and They pushed me into the bathroom
and one guy grabs my shirt and pushes me up
against the wall and he's like, hey, yo, listen, this
is what's gonna happen.

Speaker 4 (56:54):
He gives me a note.

Speaker 3 (56:55):
He's like, you're gonna have your people send money to
this so I could get a cell phone, and then
you're going to be paying me for protection to use
that cell phone weekly. And it was like a couple
hundred bucks a week. They wanted like three grand up
front and this and that. I knew I could call
my dad for three grand and give the man a
heart attack, or even have him come up with the
money to do that.

Speaker 4 (57:16):
So I said no in that moment.

Speaker 3 (57:17):
And at this point, like I'm accustomed to the compound,
I'm gaining a little balls, I guess you could say,
I'm moving around, And so he slaps me right in
the face. Glasses fly across the bathroom. And when something
like this goes down, everyone clears out of the bathroom.
No one's here to help you.

Speaker 2 (57:32):
There's other people in the bathroom.

Speaker 3 (57:33):
When they see something like this, they all walk out.
They could be in the middle of brushing their teeth,
taking the shit. They don't want to be involved. They're
out of there because they might get in trouble. I
think they just don't want to get involved in the
politics of it. And this all even my own bunk
mates when this was all going down, people that I
was breaking bread with, eating with every night, they did
nothing to help me. I was to the wolves, and

(57:54):
at that moment, I thought, I'm gonna get changed. I
don't know what's going to happen, because this is my
first violent experience that happened towards me and prison. And
they smacked me and they're like, listen, it's gonna be
a lot more than that if you don't get us
this money. So they like six months they let me go.
Five six months they let me go, and I'm thinking,
I'm like, what the hell do I do? So what

(58:15):
I end up doing is I knew I was in
that moment. I knew I was never giving them the money.
I took offence that they smacked me. My glasses like
broke a little bit. I was upset about it, and
I didn't cry. I wanted to cry. But and and
a funny joke on social media is that my cheeks
are still red from that slat.

Speaker 2 (58:31):
Yes, yeah, which is great. And and what kind of
guys were they were? They big guys, the.

Speaker 4 (58:37):
Black guys, big yeah, big guys. Fack yeah. They pulled
me up.

Speaker 3 (58:41):
They were able to pick me up on my shirt
against this wall. And I'm a big guy at that
I'm chubbing. I'm really chubby at that point. Okay, And
so I end up befriending New York Car in New
Jersey is the biggest car gang you could call it, right.
I ended up befriending a couple guys that had a
lot of respect in that prison. He was one of
the guys that you know, he had been dan in
and out of federal prison for like ten years. He

(59:02):
gave me the nickname mclovin. And he's one of those
guys that he was fun. They liked being around me.
I'm a likable person and they were hanging around with me.
We played spades, cards, did all these things. And what
I did was he had no money, so I started
buying him fifty sixty bucks worth a commissary every week.
He didn't make me buy it for him. I offered
it to him. And in return, these other guys that

(59:25):
were trying to screw with me thought I was now
this guy's prison bitch, and they had to back off
because of the politics of it, these two guys. Baltimore's
a smaller car, so I leveraged the politics of it
so it looked like I was paying these other guys
for protection and they couldn't go up against that. These
other guys, the bad guys, the Baltimore guys, were causing

(59:46):
so much rucus on this compound. People set them up,
put cell phones on their beds, dropped the note, and
they got them out of there quick because they don't
want that shit in there. They were messing up the ecosystem.
Too much attention to the unit. Wow, and that's what
ends up happening. And I don't get stabbed or anything
like that, and that's how I survived. But people, when
I tell that story, and when you see a white

(01:00:06):
kid like me on TikTok with a red banner saying
my experience in prison or the time I paid for protection,
gets people to stop because it's like, what is this
nerdy mcglove and asked, look a kid with the glasses
and red cheeks. He didn't go to prison. And that's
what makes it go. That's what works like everything got
pieced together in my life for that And it's crazy.

Speaker 2 (01:00:27):
So have you found that going through the three years,
going through all your experiences, Like when you look back
on it, you think, what I think?

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
This was the best thing that's ever happened to me
in my life because of what I think. So there's
two pieces to this. For the longest time, when I
went to prison, I studied WOLFEO. Wall Street, Jordan Belford.
I read the books. I read every you know memoir
in prison. Red Orange is a new Black book. I
read every memoir of every celebrity that's gone to prison.

(01:00:55):
I was in prison with Teresa Guidas's guiddus.

Speaker 4 (01:00:58):
Husband time you were in prison with Joe Judae, I
was in prison with Joe.

Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
I would see Teresa, who went to the Danbury prison
where my hometown was. She was out of prison at
that point. She was on visits. Me and my dad
would be sitting on a visit and she would be
there with the kids visiting Joe in the visiting room
and everyone's staring and everything. But I was in prison
with Joe. I stood behind him in the lunch line
A couple of times said what up to him? We
were never friends. We never talked, but I was in

(01:01:23):
prison with him. I was on his side of the compound,
the east side.

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
Now, are you a real housewife person?

Speaker 4 (01:01:29):
No, I never got into it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:30):
There's a lot of real housewife people watching this and
they're like, oh shit, yeah, you were in prison with
Joe Judice and you were there when Teresa Judice was
visiting Joe Judice.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
That was a big, big, big sad moment in Real Housewife,
Bravo TV World.

Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
Those clips always go viral, and I tell and I
interview a lot of people from the woman's prison who
spent time with Teresa, and those people are fascinated. Anytime,
it's guaranteed views. When you put Teresa gis guy, I
don't know how to Jude Ice you respectfully, please, Sorry,
She's been through enough when she's a changed woman, That's

(01:02:07):
what she says. I post the clips and they always
do well because people are fascinated. Between that and George Papadopoulos,
those are my celebrities that I got to physically meet
in prison.

Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
So finish what you were saying, just in terms of
the best thing that could happen to you.

Speaker 3 (01:02:20):
So when I studied those people, I thought by that point,
because society has trained everyone where prison's bad, no one
talks about prison. A lot of the big celebrities are
at this point in time four years ago. We're not
talking about their prison stays. I know, like Robert Downey
Junior just did a whole interview about his prison experience,
but that took years, and so I'd never thought prison

(01:02:42):
would be the thing I talk about. So I'm figuring, Okay,
I owned a nightclub at eighteen book worldwide acts, went
to federal prison. That's the story. This is gonna be huge,
this is gonna be a movie, this is gonna be
a TV show. So when I got out of prison,
one my mentality is that I wanted to get back
in the nightclub business. But that ended up up tanking,
and luckily it did because a year later COVID would

(01:03:04):
have happened. So even if I somehow managed to pull
it off, i'd either one be back at jail or two.

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
You know, but didn't you learn from going to prison
that the nightclub business was not for Ian Bick? No,
I didn't.

Speaker 4 (01:03:15):
I learned the money aspect wasn't. But I had the
idea that this was gonna work.

Speaker 3 (01:03:19):
This club thing if I had done it right with
the money, with everything, because I was a great marketer
and I didn't piece any of this together yet. So
I had written like three chapters of the book, sent
it to probably one hundred and fifty literary agents. I'm
queering people. Out of those one hundred and fifty, and
these are the biggest literary agents in the country, three
or four.

Speaker 4 (01:03:38):
Get back to me. They asked for the chapters, never
follow up. That was a dud. All this stuff's had.

Speaker 3 (01:03:43):
I'm reaching out to producers, got in front of some
you know, big people, and a lot of them just
they don't see the story. They don't believe in it.
And I'm just thinking, in my heart, this is gonna
be it. I'm telling you, like, this is what's my redemption.
This is the Ian bickstory. I then give up on
pursuing that and I get my job at Whole Foods.
This is in twenty nineteen, and I worked my way

(01:04:04):
up and Whole Foods allowed me to have credit that
I never had before, to get a car, to get
a dog, to get my own apartment, because when I
was still owning the club, I was still living at
my parents and I had no money, so I rebuilt
my life. The last piece of the puzzle was buying
a car in my own name. That night I buy
the car. I got a DM in my spam inbox
on Facebook from a intern at HBO or a Jigsaw

(01:04:28):
Productions that was partnering with HBO Max to do this documentary.
And I've always checked my dms because that could be
even the spam, because your greatest opportunity could be there.
And I see that and I get on the phone
with her, and then six months later we got the
green light to produce it. And I'm still in the
mindset because HBO never covered the prison stuff. That documentary,
which is off HBO now since they merged with The Discover,

(01:04:50):
was always about the nightclub stuff, the story of why
Ian Bick went to prison and Advice did the same thing.
So I believed that that's it. That's it's the story.
Hollywood loves it.

Speaker 4 (01:05:02):
That's it. That's what Jordan Belfort did.

Speaker 2 (01:05:04):
This is great.

Speaker 4 (01:05:05):
It comes out.

Speaker 3 (01:05:06):
They didn't promote it or anything. I was just one
episode in a ten episode series. I didn't really promote
it because I was so focused on Whole Foods. I
was embarrassed to talking about prison. Didn't talk about it
to anyone. My parents didn't ask me questions because it's
such society trains you. That's a sore subject. The vice
thing happens, whatever. Then last year comes about with the

(01:05:27):
MTV thing, and I'm starting to tell TikTok's about prison.
After I went viral, other creators started reaching out to
me and stitching me on TikTok and redoing duets, and
I realize there is a whole world of prison TikTok
of prison YouTube. That's a billions of people are watching,
billions of views. And that's when it hit me. The

(01:05:50):
story is not Ian bick going having a nightclub whatever. Yes,
that's unique. Yes, most people can't do it. Well, will
an eighty year old grandmother stop and watch me talking
about booking the Chainsmokers? No, well, an eighty year old grandmother,
would every single person in America that can watch a
video listen in on why a white, nerdy, twenty one

(01:06:12):
year old kid got extored in federal prison. Because that's
a fascination of it, Because not everyone could go to prison,
but every single person's fascinated about it.

Speaker 4 (01:06:19):
And that's when it hit me like a light bulb.

Speaker 2 (01:06:21):
And is that when you started.

Speaker 1 (01:06:25):
Interviewing other people who had been to prison and how
did that how did you connect with those people? No.

Speaker 3 (01:06:31):
So, from August of last year to January or December
of twenty twenty two, I'm living off my credit cards.
I had enough credit lines on the credit cards because
I'm thinking I'm gonna be a big TikToker and social
media star. I got ten thousand followers. Great, I'm in
the creativity fund. I'm going to roll in money. From
August to December, I made like forty five hundred bucks, yeah,

(01:06:51):
on all the sites, and I had like one hundred
million views. It was nothing so, and I was also
getting burnt out because I was recording four times a day.
I was doing it every day, four times a day,
sitting in my car. That's how I first started going viral,
sitting in my car doing the selfie videos. And I'm like,
I can't keep telling these stories anymore. I can't keep
talking at making it about me. This isn't sustainable. All

(01:07:12):
the creators are getting burnt out. So I said the
one thing I told myself I would never do is
have a podcast because I believed at the time the
market was oversaturated, and I would and I would only
do it if I could come up with something unique. Yes,
I said, I have this network that I've made of
prison TikTokers, and everyone's just using selfie videos. So what

(01:07:33):
if I professionalize it? What if I stick these creators
in front of a real system, a real camera, and
shoot it like a podcast. Come up with the name
locked in with Ian Bick, get these guys to partner
with me that owned a studio in New York. And
the first three episodes sucked. It was me reading a
list of questions. There were good questions, but it was
so cringe when you look at it. There was one

(01:07:53):
wide camera angle. It wasn't shot for reels. And that's
why I never do people's first podcast. When people say
to me, do you want to be on my I'm
starting a podcast, will be the first podcast?

Speaker 2 (01:08:02):
I go, call me when you've done one hundred episodes exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:08:04):
And mister Beast is so right about that about one
hundred YouTube videos.

Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
Well, who's mister Beast?

Speaker 4 (01:08:08):
You don't know who mister Beast is. What fuck is
mister bee the biggest YouTuber in the world.

Speaker 2 (01:08:11):
I don't know who mister Beast is you know who
mister be I don't know who mister beast is. Like,
you're big on Twitter, do what is mister beast? He
has a big beast on YouTube?

Speaker 3 (01:08:22):
Yeah, pretty much, and he puts millions into his videos.
Great guests you gotta have on he's doing his podcast rounds.

Speaker 2 (01:08:28):
All right, So mister Beast, I want to talk to
mister Beast, the beast of YouTube.

Speaker 4 (01:08:33):
He always says that, like, your first one hundred videos
are going to suck.

Speaker 2 (01:08:36):
Yeah, it's true.

Speaker 3 (01:08:37):
I was able to pivot extremely fast by the third episode.
I'm starting to study people like Jay Shetty. I'm starting
to read books. I'm starting to listen to interviews and
develop my questions so it's not just question answer, question answer.
We changed the set so it's one camera angle and
the guest one camera angle on me. Every clip that
you see on TikTok, I had it myself. I learned

(01:08:57):
how to cut on inshot on iPad, and I just
recently upgraded the premiere pro.

Speaker 4 (01:09:02):
I do all the clips.

Speaker 3 (01:09:03):
I make twenty eight to thirty pieces of content a week,
and we put out two full length episodes a week.
Because in my mindset was what is a competition doing.
The competition is putting out one episode a week. I
want to go to two. The competition in terms of
the in my World and prison YouTube. Obviously there's plenty
of podcasts that do like three or four.

Speaker 4 (01:09:21):
I think you do what too?

Speaker 2 (01:09:22):
Or two a week?

Speaker 1 (01:09:22):
Two?

Speaker 4 (01:09:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:24):
I late to YouTube and all that stuff. For a while.
I was just audio in whatever anyway, go ahead.

Speaker 3 (01:09:29):
So January of this year, I have about three thousand
subscribers on my YouTube just from shorts.

Speaker 4 (01:09:34):
I had never posted a full length video.

Speaker 3 (01:09:37):
Every time I made a short in my car, I
would save it without the TikTok logo, and that would
go on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, shorts and TikTok, and I've
a mass thousands of followers from.

Speaker 4 (01:09:47):
That on each platform.

Speaker 3 (01:09:49):
And so I post a couple videos and I get
like a thousand views, two thousand views whatever. This goes
on from January to March, and March I go to
two episodes a week because I want to put the rhythm.
Because at that point I was talking to agencies that
took interest because of my TikTok following, but they were
realizing that all these TikTokers want to start a podcast.
It doesn't translate into downloads necessarily, is what a lot

(01:10:11):
of people are realizing. But they said, listen, when you
meet that ten thousand download threshold, we'll talk on the audio.

Speaker 4 (01:10:18):
And I wasn't at that. I was nowhere near that.

Speaker 3 (01:10:19):
And I had a couple great episodes. You know what
changed my life? What April and April of this year.
Everything happened simultaneously. I figured out the purpose of the podcast,
because for those few months it had no purpose. It
was just me interviewing individuals. But then I started because
I always had the TikTokers who have told their story

(01:10:40):
a thousand times, and those stories are all right. I
then start bringing on the people from all over the country.
I fly them out who have never told their story,
and these would be guys I would talk about getting
raped in prison, or almost dying from addiction or anything,
the craziest stories. And these stories start to get traction.
You put on a catchy thumbnail, catchy title, and these
stories are getting out out there. And I realized that

(01:11:03):
this is my purpose, this is what I was meant
to do. Give people a voice that don't usually have
a voice. Make it so much more than about Ian
bick and in that process, it will inspire. If you're
sitting at home, you just lost your job, you just
you know, you got a divorce, anything like that, and
you're feeling down, you watch a video of someone that's

(01:11:26):
saying how they went through the lowest of the worst,
lost everything, addicted to drugs, almost died, whatever you name it.
They've been through the worst. And someone that's sitting at home,
struggling to lose weight, divorced, anything, is watching that. They
get inspired and it quickly turned into a podcast that's
entertainment and motivation. You mix that together and it's something

(01:11:46):
that's never been done before in this field. And that's
when things started taking off. The downloads went from ten
thousand to fifteen thousand, and simultaneously, my clips are going
viral from my podcast. I did a solo episode on
No Jumper and all these sites in Daily Loud, and
then all of a sudden, everything's coming together and TikTok
just bounces up, and I stopped posting selfie videos and

(01:12:08):
I just started doing the podcast clips and now the
YouTube from January three thousand subscribers to now one hundred
and forty five thousand, rapid growth I could put out
an episode in two days. It's going to have ten
thousand views.

Speaker 2 (01:12:22):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:12:22):
And the thing I love about the podcast, which differs
in a lot of people in my genre podcast audio
or video growth. Okay, the thing I love about it
is that the first half of the podcast is what
you would think of as not salacious. It's kind of boring.
We're talking about people's childhoods. We're humanizing people that have
the label of whatever it is that they did. We're

(01:12:44):
bringing them back to childhood. We're discussing it's like a
therapy session. We're discussing their root issues, where they came from,
the mistakes and the things that happened along the way.
And then it gets into the crazy stuff that make
the clips go viral and stuff. But people are listening
to that first part and it changes the stigma world
that your past does not define your future, and that's
you're not that same person.

Speaker 1 (01:13:04):
I like that, and that is exactly what I enjoy
and respect and am entertained by watching your stuff. Exactly
what you said, So you are doing a great job
with that. And also I think one thing, even what
you're saying is making some things in terms of myself

(01:13:25):
and what I do click because you're looking at it
in a business point of view, but also from an
there's an artistry to storytelling, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:13:38):
But I like that, you know, from a business point
of view.

Speaker 1 (01:13:41):
And I say hustling, and I say it in a
good way, not in a derogatory term, because I think
that term is so overused. You know, your your hustler mentality,
and again I'm saying that respectfully.

Speaker 2 (01:13:52):
You know, has helped that.

Speaker 1 (01:14:08):
How do you check the people, the men and the
women that you have on your podcast, how do you
check their paperwork? Because how do you know you're not
going to have some piece of shit on your podcast
who's saying.

Speaker 2 (01:14:20):
Well, I did you know six years for this, that
and the third?

Speaker 1 (01:14:23):
And it turns out that this guy did nine years
for some shit that you don't want to be associated with.

Speaker 4 (01:14:29):
So this is the way I look at it.

Speaker 3 (01:14:31):
One, I have a forum set up on my website
where people can apply to come on the show. We
have hundreds of people that have been piling their applications
because they get inspired. People that won't talk about their
stuff will now come on and talk about it because
it's an open, safe space to talk about it. And
they know the inspiration it can give to others. And
that's why I read all my dms and I see
all the love and the support, because a lot of

(01:14:53):
celebrities in this world have disconnected from the people that
have gotten them there in that sense, like the responses,
And I remember being that person hitting up the big
podcast to come on their show and do all these
different things and never getting responses or that. So I
never wanted to make someone that comes on my show
feel like that they weren't important enough to tell their story.
And the way I look at with checking their paperwork,

(01:15:14):
like I'll do a search, We'll research news articles just
to make sure that they at least came to jail.
If they want to come on and lie about why
they went to jail or anything like that, and if
it's public record, obviously I'll know why they went to jail,
but small details and stuff, it's not on me to judge.
It's for me to give them a safe space for
them to tell their story, give them an opportunity to

(01:15:35):
show that they are a human too, and that they've
learned from their experience. And the platform is big enough
now where if they want to fuck that up, that's
on them. I don't think my viewers are blaming me
for that. I'm just guiding the conversation because each episode
does its own documentary we go. It's not just the
salacious clips right off the back. It's beginning childhood all
the way through to the end. And that's what makes

(01:15:57):
it so much different than a lot of post in
this genre, maybe even podcast in general. I'll do a
lot of podcasts where because I try to get back
and go on these pods and that have just started
and they just ask an open ended question.

Speaker 4 (01:16:10):
It's like, tell me all the great stuff, and I
hate doing that. I want to do them, but I
hate doing.

Speaker 1 (01:16:15):
That and I can't stand it. I've been on I'm
not going to say any names. I've been on very
popular podcast. You know, they'd have you on the prison
You went to prison? Tell me about that? Yeah, And
you're like, I agree, Ian bc ianbik dot com. Yes,
that's where you can find all your stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:16:32):
Uh, it's b I c K.

Speaker 1 (01:16:34):
I'm telling you it's great content. My last question, how
are you going to make sure you don't get in
any more trouble going forward?

Speaker 3 (01:16:42):
I mean, there's a few things I keep my circle
very tight. I'm eliminating everything in my life that I
don't see in the future, whether it's friends, relationships, anything,
if I don't see them in the five year plan.
Life's too short. I have friends that are dying that
I went to high school with. I went to this
recovery conference in Arkansas last week and just seeing these
stories and life's just too short. And I was always

(01:17:04):
the person that was work, work, work, work, work till
you die, work whatever. And now I'm taking time to
enjoy my free time a little bit, spend time with
people I love and care about. And those are the
people that are going to keep me on track, the
people that'll check me. If you know, I have some
great people in my life. Now, who are you know?
Like if I'll bring up an ide and they'll say, no,
I don't think you should do that, and the OLDI

(01:17:24):
in And this is how I've known I've come a
long way, because the Oldian wouldn't value their opinion. The
eighteen year old Dean would say, Okay, I heard you,
but I didn't really hear you because I was doing
it my way. Now I have a trusted group, but bored,
I guess you could say I have advisors that are
helped guiding me, help shaping me, and I've surrounded myself
with great people who are in it to see me
win and are not in it for themselves. And I

(01:17:46):
think that changed everything, because throughout my life I've gone
in different acts, and when I'm the center stage with
the biggest celebrities in the world around me, everyone's leaching
on and those people disappeared. And now that things are
starting to come together and I'm doing bigger things, people
like that are coming back. And now i know not
to let those people in, and I'm very cautious of that,
and i never want to go back to where I was.

Speaker 1 (01:18:08):
I hear you, if someone doesn't know you, you're talking
to a guy talking to a girl, you're twenty eight,
and they're saying, well, when I was twenty two, d
da da da da, how soon do you mention well
when I Ian was twenty two? This happened, Like how
comfortable when in the conversation in the getting to know

(01:18:30):
you period of relationships, meeting, greeting, getting to know people,
if someone knows nothing about you, do you mention well?

Speaker 2 (01:18:37):
This happened to me.

Speaker 3 (01:18:38):
So a lot of people will like I'll be at
the airport or anything, they'll recognize me from TikTok and
they know that my content's prison related. On the rare occurrence,
maybe like before I got on social media. I remember
being on tender when I got out of prison, exactly. Yeah,
so I was on tender because I had a new pad.

Speaker 1 (01:18:55):
Out of your second date, you got your new body.
Well see this ripped your shredded.

Speaker 2 (01:18:59):
A little bit.

Speaker 3 (01:19:00):
But the only difference was this was I was on
house arrest. So I would say, hey, why don't you
come over. I get a bottle of wine, have dinner.
And I remember what happened, was I cook this girl dinner,
We had wine, we ended up hooking up, went to
the bedroom, hooked up, and she looks at my leg
and my leg has an ankle monitor on it, and
this girl had I figured that the girl knew me

(01:19:21):
because I would sometimes get matches where they're like, my
professor just presented about you in class as a fraud
case or whatever, and she was like, what is that?
And I told her the whole story and she ends
up ghosting me after. But yeah, things like that would happen.
But now if you're on the plane you're on a
long flight and you're chatting with a stranger. How quick
will you share that your story with just a random person.

(01:19:44):
I'm so I'm introverted, and I'm working on it where
I won't go up and talk to someone I don't know,
and usually they initiate and they come talk to me.

Speaker 4 (01:19:52):
But I have been getting better.

Speaker 3 (01:19:53):
Like last week, I was talking the uber driver and
he was prying information in a nice way about like
why I was here and the speaking and the question comes, well,
why are you qualified to present at this? And that's
when I said, you know, this is probably one of
the first times I was very open about I was like, listen,
I made mistakes when I was a kid and I
went to prison.

Speaker 4 (01:20:11):
Still kind of awkward.

Speaker 3 (01:20:12):
I'm the type of person when I'm recording, like I
give you props you're able to stand in the crowded
street recording a selfie video and I love your videos.

Speaker 4 (01:20:19):
I can't do that.

Speaker 3 (01:20:21):
I'm working on it because I know I have to
in my career, but I'd rather be alone and like
that got you, Yeah, just like it's just like that.

Speaker 4 (01:20:27):
It's awkward for me.

Speaker 3 (01:20:28):
I get read and it's just but I'm working on
it because it's just like, oh, recording a TikTok about
like prison or I don't know, yeah, well.

Speaker 1 (01:20:36):
Yeah, recording a TikTok about prison is different than you know,
most of the stuff that I talk about. But that's
just sort of my sort of getting comfortable with talking
my shit on the street. It's just out of necessity
because the reason why I do a lot of my
videos on the streets because my wife will not tolerate
me screaming and yelling into the phone at home, so

(01:20:56):
she'll be like, get the fuck out of here, Like,
if whatever you're gonna do, do it out sid. So
a lot of times it's like there's a lot of
times I'll do the videos, you know, right outside of
my place because my wife says, don't do it in
here anyway. Ianbick ianbik dot Com, Ian Bick on TikTok,
Ian Bick on YouTube. I wish you nothing but the
best going forward. I wish you peace, I wish you,

(01:21:18):
you know, prosperity and uh, you know, safety going through
and the best of luck with you. And I appreciate
you coming on the podcast, and I will definitely come
on your podcast whenever.

Speaker 2 (01:21:26):
You have me awesome.

Speaker 4 (01:21:27):
Mike, thank you so much, man, I appreciate you.

Speaker 2 (01:21:29):
I am rap por Stereo podcast done

All Episodes

EP 1,061 - Ian Bick (Podcaster/TikTok Star/Comeback Story) on Going To Jail at 18, What It's Like In Prison & Interviewing Convicts, Taking To TikTok

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

24/7 News: The Latest

Therapy Gecko

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}EP 1,061 - Ian Bick (Podcaster/TikTok Star/Comeback Story) on Going To Jail at 18, What It's Like In Prison & Interviewing Convicts, Taking To TikTok