Locked In with Ian Bick - I Paid For PROTECTION In PRISON | Ian Bick

Episode Date: April 2, 2023

At 18 years old, Ian Bick owned one of the most well known music venues in Connecticut. At 19 years old he was arrested by the FBI & IRS on 15 Federal Charges. By the time he turned 21, Ian was sentenced to 3 years in Federal Prison. Listen to the Host of Locked In with Ian Bick share his incredible story and find out how he went from rock bottom to the host of a rapidly growing podcast & social media brand.  Connect with Ian Bick: https://www.ianbick.com/Subscribe to our membership program on YouTube to get early access to interviews, see behind the scenes photos & more:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRvVklIft6DMelVW18M0oBw/joinPowered by Q29 Productions, LLC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. My name is Ian Bick, and you are locked in with Ian Bick. On today's episode, I'm going to be the guest. And Bryce Echwall, our executive producer of The Locked In with Ian Bick show,

is going to be interviewing me, a closer look at my life story. Enjoy the show, and make sure you guys subscribe, like, and comment, and leave us a review if you're listening on audio platforms. We all make mistakes, experience failure, and fall down in life. But if you decide to get back up and use it as fuel to your fire, you could choose to not let it define you. You can make it through to the other side and turn it into an opportunity. Join me, Ian Bick, as I interview people from all over the country who have experienced

the rock bottom of the American justice system and find out what they did to overcome it. These are the stories that will motivate you and inspire you to change your life. Ian, your meteoric rise to the top of the nightclub industry was nothing. short of brilliant, especially at such a young age, which made it even more unfortunate when you were federally indicted for fraud. Let's take an introspective look at the story that social media is on fire about right now. We want to know about your upbringing. So, Ian, what was one of your earliest memories at home in Danbury, Connecticut? Well, you know, I grew up in, I would say, a middle class family. We, um, we,

It was me, my brother, my mom, my dad. My dad is or was a New York City public schools teacher. He was also a principal or an administrator. He retired when I was a couple years old. My parents had lived originally in Manhattan. They're from Manhattan. And they moved to my dad's summer home. When I was born, they renovated it.

And then my dad retired from teaching and took on his catering business full time. And my upbringing, you know, we did family vacation. We did, you know, family game nights. We had movie nights on Friday nights, pizza nights. We're very family-oriented. My brother, Skyler, not really into the whole social media thing, so you guys never see any cameo appearances with him. My mom's not that way either, so it's always just me and my dad. But our family is very close. My mom was also, I think she went to school for like psychology or like social work type career and then became a massage therapist. So that was her career. And then, you know, we went to public schools. I was bullied a little bit in elementary

schools. So I was very like chubby, overweight. I was called like Twinkie. I was called the chubster. I was called all these different names. So my parents pulled me out and put me in a Montessori private school, which is basically very different from your typical private school or even any type of public school in general. It's fourth through eighth grade in one classroom. And you're having a lot of one-on-one time with the teacher because in each grade that's within that class, there's only two or three kids. So there would be like, you know, three fourth graders, two fifth graders, a couple, sixth graders, and so on. There was like a pet rabbit running around the room. there was no traditional desk seating or anything like that.

You would just sit on the floor to do your class work. There wasn't traditional testing. It was a very different experience. We had like traveled gym where you would go on Fridays to like the YMCA and all these different types of places. And then we had like camping trips once a year. It was a very different experience which definitely contributed to my like upbringing as like a different type of individual.

Do you think that that enhanced your socialization or limited you? I think private school, had I stayed in private school, I would be, well, so to put it this way, I'm a very, which is funny because I'm big on social media, but I was always shy and introverted. Anytime I stepped above those or out of that boundary, I was always very nervous for someone, like I did theater growing up. So getting on stage, always terrifying, scary for me, but once I got past that, like I'm the person that'll, that's afraid of heights, but we'll still go on that rollercoaster. and just get through it. So I would always be at the edge, like heart pumping, really scared, but I just pushed myself to go through it. So people tell you you were shy or did you believe that you were shy? I knew deep down I was shy. Uh, no one things. Did you find yourself doing things that were kind of like in contrast to that to try to test your limits? I think that I was just like pushing

through, you know, being shy. I wanted, I had this certain image of being out there and I always like being in the limelight and being in the spotlight. And that kind of propelled me. So I eventually realized that if I stayed in private school, that would limit my ability to have a social life. You know, on TV, like high school musical was big, all these different things. It's like you need to be part of the clicks. You need to be out there. You need to be socializing. So I went for eighth grade back to a public middle school so I can like reintegrate um with the social dynamics of public schooling and then went to a public high school okay cool so from private school back to public a little bit of a mix family very community oriented I'm interested in understanding when was the first time that you

saw kids your age drinking or smoking or partying was that early on uh I think in middle school kids were exposed to there was a lot of weed i mean like i sold weed for a little bit like in eighth grade to kind of fit in and be cool because everyone was going through that you know dc clothing healy sneakers uh type phase so i had my hair grown out really long i wore clothes that i didn't like uh really like i was baggy pants um i carried around a skateboard even though i didn't know how to skate uh and my my good friend at the time um would steal weed from his dad and and we would sell it. We didn't need the money. We just, we were trying to fit in. We were trying to be cool. No one was really drinking at that time. It was just pretty much just weed. So, you know,

because your episode of HBO's Generation Hustle was called The Parties Over. So I just always find it interesting. When I think about it, you know, not necessarily within the community was where you were exposed to parties, but more like at home within your family. Is that correct? Like with your dad's party throwing business, basically? The first time I was exposed to like a real like production or party was in eighth grade and because my dad owned this catering company and he did like a lot of film festivals um he worked for a lot of celebrities like the clintons um the harry potter premieres i got to go to the goblet of fire premiere and meet like emma watson and daniel radcliffe and the whole cast and take pictures so i was exposed to this event planning business and the

first time i got a real taste of it was in eighth grade he um he had a lot of parties when he was running the Connecticut Film Festival. And he said, you know, I'm short someone to run this event. Can you go over there and set it up? Now, mind you, it's eighth grade. I'm what, 12 years old. And he's trusting me to do it. And he's like, are you sure you could do this? I'm like, yeah, dad, I watched you. Like, I'm a visual type learner. So I study, you know, individuals I watch by their actions. I was never textbooks smart. I was always, you know, show me how to do this and I'm going to learn from it quickly and then do it. So I run this party for him for 400 people. I was in charge of like 20 staff as a 12 year old.

At 12 years old? At 12 years old run this party for him. And a police officer comes up to him that night when my dad made it back to the party because he wasn't there. He was at another event. And he said, is that your son? And my dad said, yeah. And the officer said, you know, you must be really proud of him.

He probably struggles in school because he's just on a different level than what, you know, they're teaching you in school and what they're doing. And, you know, at that time frame, I'm in middle school getting into a lot of trouble. I'm standing out, you know, I was always that entrepreneurial kid that was running lemonade stands in my community. I was always the person that set a goal like, I want a new computer this summer. So I was like selling candy on the road, selling lemonade. And then even in middle school, my parents would take me to school and I would walk with the money they gave me, they gave me like 20 bucks or 30 bucks a week. And I would walk to the CVS next to the middle school, load up with energy drinks, gum, candy, and I would sell

it out of my backpack in the middle school always. So you were always entrepreneurial, and that's how you differed from your classmates, you think? I think I differed from my classmates not only in the business mindset, but also in I was very anti-authority when it came to what I deemed as stupid rules. So for example, one day the middle school came up with this idea, no backbacks in the school because it was a very overcrowded middle school and they wanted to come up with this rule stating no backbacks they figured that would solve their problems. So I start this backpack petition. I go around and I'm the only kid in the school wearing a backpack and I get in trouble. I get suspended all the time, all those different

things. I would wear a shirt. You know those creative shirts from Hollister. I had one that said, this is what happens when you party naked. I would go to school wearing that and then I got suspended for that they said don't wear flip flops i would wear flip flops all these different things just to like you know bucket in their face i guess you could say is what i was doing getting in trouble is different from actually running into problems with authorities like conceptualizing jail like when was the first time that you knew of jail or actual consequences for your actions when you're getting in trouble I think the interesting thing about my story is that when you look at it from an outsider's perspective as a whole, everything was a domino effect and escalated. So I start off by getting in trouble with principals at my school to then getting in trouble with my neighborhood, then eventually getting in trouble with local police, then it getting up to the state level and then going up all the way until it's at the FBI, the IRS and the U.S. Attorney's Office. So my first time, my interaction with like police office, so to say, was mischief night. It was our sophomore year high school. This is 2010. The beginning

of sophomore year, I'm 15 at the time. And my best friend Stephen, who was in the HBO documentary, who I had met in private school, we decide to go out and take insulating foam, which is the spray cans of foam and go to the president and the vice president's house of our community. It's called Lake Wabika. It's a private Jewish community. And they had came up with rules saying, you know, don't use a golf cart. Don't use paintball guns. Basically all these rules that I figured were targeted towards me because we were the only kids that had a golf cart. We were the only kids playing paintball. So we wanted to get back at them. And we took this foam and we figured that by spraying it on their car handles, it would just lock them out of their cars. Well, it didn't do that. And

and instead it dripped down the sides of their cars and caused $5,000 worth of damage in total between the two cars. It's like a nice Jeep Wrangler. It's a nice BMW. And then we're driving around the golf cart that night doing this mischief, go back to my house and then we figured the cover story because we knew we were going to be looked at as the first culprits because I was deemed the black sheep of the community. So we take toilet paper, toilet paper the tree outside my house and figure, you're okay. You know, now that there's toilet paper on the tree, they're going to think our house got hit too with vandalism and we're all good. Well, that didn't happen. They didn't buy that whole thing about having the toilet paper and the police showed up the next day. They just assumed they were

pointing in our direction. They knew I was like the troubled kid of the community. They showed up. The officer's talking to my dad says, hey, do you mind if we search your garage? My dad's thinking, you know, my kids didn't do this or even if they did, you know, they got rid of the evidence. They searched the garage. They open the garage and what do they see? The cans of the insulating foam that we left used in the garage. We were the worst criminals ever. And we got caught, sentenced to community service and probation that would go away once we completed the community service. So you start a charity and get your community service hours taken care of? Basically what happens is that, you know, when I get this community service, I didn't know what I was going to do.

I figured I would, you know, go to local places, volunteer, whatever. Like a lot of my ideas, like for business and stuff, you never really expect, or just in general, you never expect that one good idea. It just comes to you randomly. So I was sitting in an English class one day and we were reading this essay on homelessness and then we watched this pay it forward movie. and I put the two together. I'm like, you know what? I want to start a charity for the homeless population in Danbury, and I called it Fight for the Homeless.

And my dad fronted the money for us to buy bracelets that were like the Livestrong type bracelets, different colors that said fight for the homeless on it. I sold those for a dollar apiece. We raised like $1,500 bucks for the local charity shelter. You sold $1,500 of those wristbands? $1,500 of those wristbands. We had a big high school.

You know, it's over 3,000 kids. and the news times, the local news, starts publishing all these great articles about me. No one knew that the reasoning behind me starting that charity was influenced because we were on probation, but because we were minors, it was sealed. So there was no bad press saying, I got caught or anything like that. So the article comes out. I go to the probation officer, the court, whatever, the magistrate for the juvenile hall, put the article on her desk.

that was it hours were fulfilled and that was behind me wow and and in this story some viewers might know that you do have a love-hate relationship with the news times as you continue through your career right i think that's interesting the most interesting thing with the danberry news times and if you go through every single article they start on this very high note like they're publishing a lot of press good press on me you know danberry whiz kid they named me like one of the top 10 most interesting people in Danbury, all these, you know, puff pieces. And then all of a sudden, they make a left field, which kind of, when I got arrested, it's all bad. And it never redeemed itself from there. And even now, like, they'll publish articles that, like, they're, they're not capturing

any of the positive things we're doing now. It's always the bad. And that's a big problem with media nowadays, too. Once, like, you do something bad, it's very hard to redeem yourself in the media's perception. There's no like follow up story when you get out of prison saying, oh, he's doing all this great in the world that just doesn't happen. Psychologically, what do you think was the driving force for you to be the whiz kid? You know, what was it? You know, I've heard you say before that it was seeking validation from your peers or, you know, maybe it was because you identified as different from everybody and you wanted to like, blow that up. You know, what was happening in your head? There's multiple, you know, I think,

reasons for why I was the way I was, but the ultimate driving factor was that I wanted to be liked for so long. I was always the kid that was picked on, bullied, and was just like, I wasn't good at sports. I was, I did theater, but I wasn't the best, you know, actor or singer or dancer. I was just always like the outlier of the group compared to my friends that were super smart or had the good looks. I just felt like I couldn't fit into that. So when I found a way for me to be different, that was so different from everyone else, I just ran with that, which is why like when I started the charity, I started wearing a suit and tie and carried a briefcase to school. It's why everything I did had to be larger than life. When I, you know, do this charity thing, I'm putting up posters.

I would take an idea that I would see. Like whenever someone ran like a group or a charity or something at school they would have, these little pieces of paper printed out, like basic paper promoting their event. I would take that to the next level. We got these professionally made banners, like these giant posters, put them up all over the school. Everything always had to be larger than life and that was like the association to me. And it was just like that chase to be liked by everyone. I could not stand someone not liking me.

Whenever there was like a hateful comment and this is something I had always struggled with, like I needed to jump out there and correct it and argue with them and try to change their opinion of me. When you say larger than life, do you just mean you want to be famous? I mean, you took theater. You know, you want, what did you want to be when you grew up? I don't know if famous was the right terminology only because back then social media wasn't big. We had, you know, Facebook, which was normal. You had your few hundred Facebook friends, whatever.

There was no social media influence. to kind of look up to. What I wanted to be was like that next Mark Zuckerberg, you know, the next guy that founded Snapchat or anything like that, the next Elon Musk, the next Peter Thiel. And that wasn't because of their fame. That was just because of the idea that there are these successful entrepreneurs that didn't go to college or dropped out of college because everyone that was around me had the mindset from their parents that you had to go to college to be successful. And even at that young age, even in freshman, sophomore year, you know, at that time, I did want to go to college. I wanted to be an FBI agent or a member of law enforcement, and I knew you had to get into a good

school to be that. But I still wasn't believing that you needed to go to college to be successful. And that was just like another thing that would, that in my mind was differing me from my classmates. Okay. Let's talk about why you decided to create the party promotion business after the school dance. Everyone knows about the school dance, right? Do you want to talk about it a little bit? I think basically a summary of the school dance is that when I started the wristbands for the fight for the homeless project, I wanted to take it to the next level and a mixture of me seeing the school dances being ran by the school not performing well and my dad doing events and me being like a visionary. I could always see like once I have an idea, I could see that idea like 10 steps down the line what it could become. If you say to me, like, if you plant a seed, not a lot of people could see the image of that tree or plant growing to its full potential. Me, I could see, I can envision it.

I could picture a world with it. So what happens is I go and I create this dance, this idea. I call it a night at the Matrix. It was a local corporate center called the Matrix Corporate Center that had just opened up. No one had done a dancer yet. I go in, I convince the principal after all the teachers and student body presidents and everything told me no, I went above their heads, convinced the principal to let me do a dance, call it a night at the matrix, and it was very successful. I organized everything. And I want to touch on this aspect of it

because this gives like a little insight to like what my work ethic at the time was. The day of the dance, I was the first person in there before any of the banquet staff was there. And I, I didn't know like how banquet halls worked. I was always trained by my dad with catering like we did all the work. So I wasn't aware that staff was going to come in and set the place up. So I went and I didn't work at this facility but I went walk through their room set the whole place up before their staff even came and they walked in like shocked. They're like who did all this because they were paid to do that. And I was like me. And they were just like outstanding by the fact that I'm this young 15 year old kid that put this all together. I was there since seven in the morning. I had told security I was there for. for the event, they let me in. And that night, the dance was a success. We raised even more money for charity. And the millionaire owner of this corporation, Glenn Nelson, comes up to me, and he's like, how old are you? I tell him I'm 15, and he looks at me. And this is a guy like I would have idolized to be, you know, expensive suit, tie, shoes, the whole nine yards, powerful handshake. He shakes by hand, he says, you, sir, when you're 16 years old, call me, you're working for me.

And that was just like my first dive into knowing like I was different and there was such a world out there besides college. Just answer, were you ever addicted to drugs or alcohol? Never did drugs. Never. I would, we would try in high school. We would do like Dubra as a cheap liquor, make like juggle juice, like what every kid was doing. But it just wasn't for me.

I would always fake smoke, like take a little puff and like cough it out and never inhale just to like fit in. But I was never motivated by drugs or alcohol. Okay. So then let's talk about addictive personalities. because you are drug-free and pretty much alcohol-free today and back then. So this story takes a hard turn that a lot of our viewers know. But early on, it seems like you had like an obsessive or addictive behavior,

but it was viewed as a success because it was always like productive work. You know, it's a concept that's talked about today. like, you know, it's like obsession with your work. And then it became obsession with the nightclub. And it's all success, success, success. So can you just talk about like your work mentality and like the pattern? Like are you there at 7 a.m. at the Matrix Center because you're obsessive about it? Like are you one track minded?

What's your progress pattern? I was very, very obsessive with my work. And so there's there's two different. components to what my addiction was. So the first part was my obsession with work was my drive. I was always the first one in, the last one out when I was working for my dad. Like I just had an insane work ethic at times where my friends were a lot of kids in high school didn't have jobs, but when they did, they were working at clothing stores or whatnot. I was doing physical, hard labor. I was working in the kitchen. I was doing waiting jobs. When I started working for the corporate

Center, you know, setting up meetings for these big executives and then eventually they had me start booking proms for other schools. Like I just always had this insane work ethic at a very young age that, you know, no one could ever have been on my level. And like a lot of kids just didn't have that stamina. It's very hard to work in a kitchen. It's very hard to work in the event business. And that's what differed me. Now when you mix that with a drive of wanting to be liked and and wanting to be popular because I was being obsessed with being liked. That was my addiction. You mix those two together.

It's like it's a fire because one's driving the other. And when you have that full circle of everyone, you know, liking you and praising you, it just adds fuel to wanting to work even harder and keep doing it. For me, it was never about the event or the party. I threw a lot of house parties. I threw, you know, a lot of events in high school. I helped them plan the proms. I helped them do homecoming. I did all these things that we could sit here and talk about for hours. And I didn't enjoy those events. I didn't like those events. What I liked and what I loved

was the process. I loved the planning of the events. I love building hype. I love marketing the event. I love the week of a big show. And this applied on a small level doing school dances to a big level booking like someone like Steve Ioki. I love just like seeing the hype on social media. hearing people talk about it. Like, I love that. That's what fueled me. And then when the show's over, you lose that. Like the night of the show, people are talking about it.

Yeah, but it's not the same effect because it's dead and gone. You're only as good as your last event, your last project, whatever. That's the part that is like addiction. It's like fleeting. It's always fleeting and it's never enough and it's next, next, next, next, next. But it's one of those stories that it's like you all of a sudden you wake up one day, like, wow, who did all this? You know, it's almost like imposter syndrome. So I think that's an interesting part of your story.

Exactly. Like someone, you know, once someone sober's up, they automatically have that urge to get drunk again. So me, the sobering up part was the night of the event where it's starting to die out, whatever. So right in my mind, it's how could I go and plan the next event to build that hype again? That's what my drive was. And like I said, that was always viewed as positive.

Okay, so throwing parties, throwing parties at the theater. what happens next. Talk about how the event promotion business grew for you. After the dance, I figured in my mind because I was this visionary person, how do I turn this into a business? I just had, you know, three or four hundred kids paid $20 to go to the school dance that, you know, made money, but it was for charity. How do I turn this into a business for myself? And I noticed there is a need. A lot of businesses, or basically most successful businesses, grow from realizing that there is a need in the market for it or expanding someone else's idea and turning it into better. So at this point in time, there's a need in the market for a dance or an event that's not ran by

prison, that's not ran by high school officials because high school dances, they're making sure you're not booty grinding too close, like dancing too close. They're making sure the songs aren't edited. They're, you know, breathalizing you to make sure you come, not coming and drunk. So how do I eliminate those factors? At this point in time, after that dance, I had, because all of these upperclassmen went to this dance, I now had relationships with juniors and seniors, which brought me into this whole world of throwing house parties. So this dance happens and I'm throwing these massive house parties. I'm throwing tailgates for the football. ball games. I'm just doing these three or four hundred people house parties. Like the house

parties got so big and we live on a lake. We had a patio set up. We had a bar set up. We were charging five dollars for people to drink. My parents would be upstairs and I'd have kids go upstairs and like give them wine and food and say, hey, everything's good downstairs. Like upperclassmen that worked for my dad that were, they would reassure them that everything was good. And these events got so big to the point where my parents put up a big wedding tent in our yard with a dance floor and porta potty's. And eventually they said you can't do these parties here anymore. So that's when a mixture of that, a mixture of the dance in that business sense gave me the idea to rent out this theater in Danbury where my dad had done events for. It was called the Palace

Theater, rented it out and turned it into a nightclub for the night. I put in a dance floor. I put in lighting. I got a DJ. I paid security. I had bars set up, non-alcoholic bars. We were making all these virgin like cocktails. We were doing all these different things. I hired the local police department to stand out front. I did all of this and I had just turned 16 and put together this whole production and we made like $1,500 bucks profit from this event. You just capitalized on making the school dance cool and actually ran with it. Basically and we called or I called myself, this is where it's at, entertainment. Because if that's where our parties were going to be where it was at for the night, make it a play on words, this is where it's at. As you're growing in popularity, did you have smooth talk with the ladies? Were you into pretty girls or just wanted attention from the popular guys? I was extremely shy about women.

I had, you know, throughout high school, throughout the club, I had two or three girlfriends. All the times, they made the first move. was never that kid that made the first move. And when you talk about hookups at high school, it's not like sex. I mean, some of my friends were having sex, but it was like a makeout session, you know? So what was it like when a pretty girl started giving you attention early on junior year? I don't think I could ever, I was very unsure and insecure with myself. I was insecure with the way I looked. I was insecure about women. Girls, you know, I would never tell. I'm sure, like,

I would find out later on that a girl was into me after she flared with me. But I was also just focused on business and my party promotion business. I didn't really care for a woman. Like there was one girl that had a crush on me. Like she literally had to push me into a closet the night of a house party and start making out with me for me to even interact with her. And it really wasn't until I got out of prison that I ever really became comfortable with myself and started gaining confidence. And even now, like I think I'm even more confident now than ever with reaching out towards women only because I have grown like this brand on social media. But that just took time.

It took years to build up to that. Whereas some of my friends were just naturals. They could go into a girl at a bar or at a party and just, you know, just be out there. And I couldn't do that. But at the same time, they could never go up on a stage and plan an event or go in front of a thousand people and do a talk. But I could do that. So it's just different in that sense. But I think with the women part, I was just always.

afraid of rejection because it was easier for me to be well liked and not rejected by throwing a party everyone wanted to go to. But if I wasn't the most attractive out of the bunch and asked a girl out, I don't think I could have dealt with that rejection aspect of it. And that's what I was afraid of. Later on, you basically end up going to prison instead of college. But did you plan on going to college? I planned on going to college up until junior year. Eighth grade, going back to middle school, I was a D student at best. And that was, I would say, intentional in the aspect where everyone's parents were telling my friends and peers that you needed great grades in eighth grade to get into a good college.

High expectations. High expectations. And I was in the mindset where who the fuck is looking at middle school grades to get into a college? And I'm processing this at a very young age. So I blow all my grades. They send over a list to the high school of a kids to watch out for kids that are failing. I make it on that list. I'm at like the top of the list and they put failing.

You're failing? I'm failing going from eighth grade to ninth grade. I get when my counselor sits me down the summer going into freshman year and they say you're on this list, you know. And that motivated me to be different and prove people wrong. So I went off and got, I was top of my class. Like at all classes, freshman, sophomore year. So when you're throwing parties, your junior year, you're doing well in school. Well, so freshman and sophomore year, I'm doing extremely well.

I take AP classes. I'm doing great. My mindset is, okay, get into a good college, compete and be at the top, well-liked, top 10 of my class, this and that. But then once I started throwing events and I really had a promotion business, right after that theater event, I started renting out a local nightclub called Tuxedo Junction, which used to do these things called teen nights. The teen nights had died out. I go into the club and convince the owner to let it rent to me. These events start taking off where I'm doing,

you know, it grows from 300 kids the first one into 2,000 kids by the last one. And I'm making, the most profit I ever made in a night was $10,000 cash profit from these events. And the business model is you get kids from all over the tri-state area to pay 10 or 12 bucks to come to these events. It's not ran by the school. All these kids would pre-game because we didn't sell liquor. You couldn't sell liquor to minors, but they would come drunk. And we did themes. We did the Christmas rave, the paint party.

We did the Halloween rave, all these different themes. And I was the first person to bring, this is 2011, to bring electronic dance music to Danbury, Connecticut. it. This was popular in other areas like Massachusetts, New York City, L.A., but I was the first person to bring it to Danbury. So when you mixed this mashup of hip hop and electronic music together, the kids were loving it. And you have the Spanish music and all this. And these events started blowing up. So this is junior year now of high school. I'm 16 years old. I have this business. And I am literally going to school in a suit and tie. I have a briefcase I'm carrying around. I'm answering business phone calls, like from the venue or from other promoters in the middle of class, I would walk up. You know, instead of saying, hey, I'm going on a bathroom break, I would say, I have to take this call and I would leave the classroom. When I got detentions or suspensions for those situations, I would call my dad and he would

call the school and he would say, listen, if you do not get my son out of that detention, I'm calling my lawyer. That got me out every time. So if anyone's going through situations, just pull the lawyer call. call. So I'm doing all this. I'm making all of this money and I knew right then and there two factors. One was I was making all this money and I had this business that I wasn't going to college. My parents said, are you sure about this decision? They sent me to Johnson Wales in Florida. Cooking school? The hospitality school. They sent me there for a weekend. And this is their Miami

campus. And I go there for the weekend and I get to meet people. They give us a tour. They bring us to the Fountain Blue Hotel in Miami. And they said, listen, this is where you could get a prestigious internship if you graduate our four-year program. And they introduced us to interns that were working there. You know what the intern was doing? Folding napkins and polishing silverware after a four-year degree, making probably at the time,

you know, $15 or $20 an hour with a degree. And I knew in that moment that I was already way beyond that. level and they also were saying that the first two years are all academics you don't get into your actual profession for the last two years like the hands on experience so looking back on it now could I have benefited in some scenarios from a college degree yes to learn like the business side of things but to learn the skills that I already knew how to run an event how to work in the hospitality business that whole side of it college was it going to help me and I knew that at a very young age and that's why I decided not to go to college by my junior year of high school.

School was just, my parents said no matter what, I had to graduate high school. So I started paying kids to do my work for me. I would pay to get a copy of the test. I would pay my own mother to do essays for me. And it was actually funny because she is this, you know, college graduate with all these degrees and she would spend all night writing an essay just for the teacher to give her like a C or a low B. and my mom's like flip it a shit say this teacher doesn't know what the hell she's talking about.

Did you just say you paid your mom to write your English essays? I would give my mom a hundred bucks to write my English essays. I would pay students. I would cheat in any way possible just to make sure my whole attention span could be on my business. I'm answering calls. I'm sending out tweets. Twitter was big back then. The Facebook event pages are big back then.

I'm taking stacks of flyers and going to the, we had these big statements. care cases, the high school's four levels. I would go to the top level and right before the bell would ring, I would drop the whole stack down. So as the bell's ringing, everyone's coming, they're getting showered in flyers. And that was my promotion. That's the theater, baby. Everything was theatrics. And that's what just, it propelled me. I don't think you ever actually wanted to go to college, especially if people you looked up to were like Zuckerberg and all these anti-hero heroes. You know what I mean? Like, like, and you basically, went into a trade at 14, you know, and just like learned all these skills on your own,

which, you know, more people should probably do. So you're making, you're making upwards of sometimes $10,000 a night. You're throwing these parties from 200 people. Then all of a sudden it could be 2,000 people. Let's talk about the timeline of you getting investors. When did people start taking your business where it's at? productions. Seriously, the timeline when you first collected investor money. Oh, actually, I want to, make it clear for the viewers. At this time that you're throwing these parties at tuxitos, you didn't

own tuxedos. You were just renting that bar out for a promotion as if you would rent out a different nightclub, correct? Didn't own it, just rented it, paid X amount of dollars, and I'm 16. Yep. So let's talk about the first time that people were taking your business serious enough to potentially invest in it. It was 2012 and what was going on at the time. You know, when you look back on it, whoever I talked to in interviews, even like the directors at HBO had said this. And a big question is, you know, you had this great business. Why did you try to go for more?

Why didn't you just stick doing the teen parties? Well, two things happen. One, it's already in my mind that I want to go bigger because once you get a taste of something, you want to expand. It's the same reason why, you know, people that are already super rich in the world are going and starting more businesses or acquiring more things. If you're not growing, you're dying. Exactly. Like Jeff Bezos, did he need to go buy whole foods? No. Did he want to go buy whole foods? Yes, because he wanted to expand and build more business.

So in my mind, I'm thinking I want to expand and go on to the next level, which I knew to go from these teen parties and to be taken seriously, the next level was doing concerts. And at that time, people like Mac Miller, Big Sean and Taiga were really hot in the market. The other aspect of this was that the nightclub, Tuxedo Junction, was getting an influx of people that wanted to be the next Dian Bick. All these kids saw what I was doing and they figured, you know, we can rent the venue and do this just as easy as him. So the market got oversaturated. All those kids failed because they weren't putting in the work. But the club was getting all this free money of rental money.

They would take the guaranteed money. So you had to pivot. I had to pivot because now the market was oversaturated. People couldn't, and social media wasn't at the branding aspect of the way it was now where people could differ between what's legit and what's not. So I pivoted and got this idea to start getting into these massive concerts. I knew that concerts costed money and I didn't have the funds, I didn't have the funds to do these concerts on my own.

I link up with these local partners, these local business-minded kids. that were from the town over from me. And we get this idea to do a Wiz Khalifa show in Danbury. Okay, pause. How do you link up with kids from a different town? They know you're popping on Facebook? What? Yeah.

DM? They Facebook DM me. And they said, Ian Bick, you're the goat. We want to work with you. And then you presented them an idea? It's actually so funny because I just realized this now and I never even thought about it. At each level of my career, because I've gone from nightclub promoter to club owner to, you know, then federal inmate, federal inmate to then social media star, you know, each time there's always

people, there's a correlation between people reaching out and trying to network and get into your field. Like people don't understand the value of the DMs. You don't know who you're going to meet. I didn't even know, like I wouldn't have known about HBO if I wasn't checking my DMs. It was just a random person that DM me saying they were interning for HBO. It's not amazing. And people think they're like too cool to like check their DMs and message people back or engage with comments on social. You really never know. Like, and I would, and even if you, if you're not at the level I'm on or you're not

a celebrity or whatever you are, you could be missing out on like your potential girlfriend or boyfriend and your DMs that slid in with something good and you're just refusing to open it or look at it because you're thinking you're better than everyone else or whatever the reason is. So it's just, it's interesting how that plays into perspective. So I meet these kids. Yep. We raise this money.

I mean, obviously we could sit here and go on the in-death. of everything. Like this is like my whole story is like a two day event for a story. For sure. But I want to know what it, okay, you raise this money. Like you call people and they automatically sign up because you're already popular in the community. What's the room like when you are having people write you a check for 10 grand? My mindset was that if you needed to get money from someone as an investment based on what I've seen on TV and a Google search, that you needed to have a contract. So I go on legalzoom.com and I just type an investment agreement. I print out this investment agreement and I edit, never went to a lawyer, just edited all the information to

fit my business. And I was pitching to people if you invest a hundred thousand dollars or say the show cost $100,000, I would give them a budget because back then we were making these spreadsheets of showing what the expenses were. I would say if the show cost $100,000, you put up $10,000, you would get 10% of profits after your initial investments recouped. Okay, but that's a great pitch. Where are you? I'm in high school. No, no.

Tell me one, let's say the first one or the second one, whatever one is sexier. Like, where are you in the living room? Like with these people? I was, well, the first pitch was just at dinner with my family. I got my aunt and uncle to put up the money. Okay, so you gave them this idea with the spreadsheet and with the dividends and you said you're going to be guaranteed. Your hook was the guarantee.

No, the hook was not. the guarantee yet. It was just you would get a potential 10% of profits. They said yes, but then I couldn't get anyone else to say yes. That's when I come up with the idea to guarantee not the profits, but guarantee their initial investment. So if you put up 10 grand, you would get your 10 grand guaranteed even if the show did zero people because I was so confident that Wiz Khalifa was going to bring in enough to at least break even. And then they would get a percentage of the show and profits. So it's all on the train towards Wiz Khalifa. That's on the strength of your first investments. So you're sitting in there with your aunt and uncle. They say yes. Now tell me what the dinner

dining table is like. Are you you just like walk in with your suit and tie and you you say this is how it's going to go and they just said yes, please sign me up. I mean it's different in that scenario because they're family. Okay. So take me to another one. They're a wealthy family that was going to support me either way. Okay. The first time someone who wasn't your family invested, tell me. I went to friends that had previously invested. I would let my friends invest in the teen nights. Okay. Give $400, make a couple hundred because we were making so much money.

So other kids? So I went to other kids first and I brought them these contracts. Now, these are bigger amounts of money that we're talking about now. So they don't have it, but they're going to their parents. Okay. So now their parents, once they find out it's a guaranteed investment back, their parents are giving them checks to then give to me that I'm collecting throughout the high school hallways. So you're using other kids to sell their parents on investing in this is where it's at production.

Correct. And it worked because I already had established track record. They knew that I was one in the paper already for being this whiz kid. And two, I had a successful party promotion business. No one else was doing it. I was in the top of my field in that aspect. And your parents were supporting you at this time? 100%.

They didn't know about the ins and outs. But everything I was doing at this time was 100% legit. Of course. Was it not like was the guaranteeing their money back a bad business practice? Yes, but nothing was illegal. I took the money in. It all went into one bank account. Nothing got spent, you know, for anything other than business purposes. Everything was legit. Your intentions were to just have a successful show. Exactly. Keep getting more popping. Yeah. We had an office set up. Like this whole business was built literally from the ground up, a hundred percent legitimate, which a lot of people in the news get wrong. Like it started very, very legitimate. I could have been like that next big success story. We got an LLC made. We're doing very strict accounting like what's going in, what's going out. We're looking at the bank records. I'm going into local banks with depositing checks for, you know, $10 or $15,000 and that's what was happening. Looking back now, when is the moment that you

realize, okay, this is when I started being investigated. Well, I think, we have to look at what exactly happened that caused this. So this whole period of time, this whole, you know, the criminal aspect of this case was only over the course of six months. So I go from WizKid in high school promoting these parties to everything great to it could have been like the next big thing to it literally falling apart within six months. So what happens at WISKalifa? The WISKalifa show never happens. One of our part. How much money had, I'm sorry, to interrupt you. How much money had you accumulated and then tell me about WISKLifa? We had raised $120,000 for WISKalifa. It's sitting in this bank account. Long story short,

our business partner lies to us. Can't get us WISKalifa. We go back to the investors. We're sitting around my living room and said, listen, you know, we can't do WIS, but we have access to do smaller shows with different artists. And if you leave your money invested, you know, you'll get a percentage of those shows still guaranteed, not probably. but your initial investment guaranteed back. If you stay on board, you'll get to meet the artist, this and that. About half pulled out. We were left with like $60 to $70,000. And before Wiz Gleafa backed out, you hadn't spent any of that $120K. Nope. The 120K was raised legitimately by the books. Everything was kosher. And it was still in that bank account. So when

they pulled out, you just wrote them a check back. Gave them a check right away. Okay. I take the leftover money. We have another partner. And Like there's a lot of figures involved in this whole story. It wasn't just me pulling all the strings. Like it needs to be a TV show or a movie to really like get in death about this whole scenario. But we want to give like the viewers like a general synopsis of my story. So they understand the timeline and understand, you know, how things happen without holding up hours and hours of their time. Okay.

So I raise the money or I have this leftover money. Yeah. Put it into this other. concert business. Basically, look at it this way. I'm the hedge fund and I have my investors. I'm pooling their money and investing into another company. So I'm the middleman. I'm not in charge of the concerts. I'm not booking the concerts. I'm just that middleman. And I give them this money and they divide it into like five or six shows. And this is where everything goes wrong. The first show I'm being told numbers look great. we're going to make a lot of money.

And this is at the University of Rhode Island. Tickets are selling great. And I'm relaying that to my investors. I'm saying, guys, we're making money. Everything's good. You know, I rent us a limo to take the kid investors to the show. We get a hotel room. And then the night of the show, I'm like looking at this arena, like, thinking, wow,

I'm, you know, I'm 16 years old, 17 years old. I'm 17 at the time. I just invested in like this big college show at this, you know, prestigious school University of Rhode Island. This is awesome. And one of the partners of the show comes up to me on the other production company said, man, you know, we took a fucking beating tonight. Like this is terrible. And I'm like, what do you mean? The place looks packed. He's like, dude, you know, we barely sold enough tickets. And this is something I would come to learn in the concert industry as I became a nightclub owner is that a lot of it's smoking mirrors. Like,

you can make things look good, like make a room look good. But there's really not that many people in that room or vice versa. Like 500 people can look like a thousand people or a thousand people could really only be 500. So we didn't have enough people to break even. And this is the turning point where I'm at the crossroads of how do I go back and tell the investors who are my friends, who are family that I had, I've been telling them that they were making money and then to go back after they saw the show, which they think looks good, that it didn't make money. So in my mind, they're going to think he's trying to keep the profits

for himself or he's trying to screw us. So it was a lose, lose either way. And because of that obsession of being liked and wanting my business to succeed, I told my first lie that the show made money and that and then came up with these, you know, fake spreadsheets of profits, imaginary profits when it had really lost. And in my mind, I'm thinking, okay, I could cover. this up with the other shows. How old are you at this time? I'm 17. And this is the first time when you're 17 that you've committed wire fraud?

I would, that part wasn't wire fraud. But it's fraud. I don't know if it's necessarily fraud in that aspect because I raise the money legitimately. We'll get to the fraud aspect. But it's like the fake receipts. You're sending fake receipts. Yeah, I'm sending them a fake receipt saying that they made money on the show. Got it.

Now I plan to cover that up by the other shows making money. well, every single show bombed. And now once you tell one lie, you know, it's hard to keep up with the lies. And it's just this domino effect. Now, I've heard you basically blame a lot of external factors for the reasons why the show tanks and it's smoking mirrors. Like, is it, could it be that the magnificent Ian Bick just wasn't that good at connecting the dots on this string of shows or was it just bad luck? I think the biggest thing looking back on it now was that I got lazy. Anytime looking back at my whole life when either I was running the nightclubs, when I was

doing the teen parties, when I owned the nightclub myself, when I went back to own the nightclub and even now in social media, anytime I'm not counting on someone else and I'm putting in the work myself, it's always been a success. Anytime at that point I'm thinking I'm already successful because I raised all this money and I could sit back and be this corporate guy like the next scooter brawn then it failed and that was just a common occurrence we lose all this money I'm lying to investors I end up digging myself out of that hole and get all these other investors and you know by the time I'm 18 I raise over half a million dollars and that's when I'm really thinking you know like wow I'm successful Like we have all this money in the bank.

We're not doing any accounting. We're investing it into random shit. Like I bought like a clothing company online. I opened up my first nightclub called Skybar, which we actually got sued for by Skyvaca because I had two Ys at the end of it. So I had a drop a Y. I put $250,000 into another string of concerts that was going to happen later that year. I invested in other startups.

My plan was, and we also had this wholesale business. We were selling electronics that ended up being fake. So I had this whole business that was based on money that I looked at as loans. We were going to people and we were saying, hey, if you loan us $50,000, you will get $75,000 back in between 30 and 90 days. I was promising people a 50% rate of return to raise their money because that was the only way I could get people to raise money. And I banked on counting those, on repaying those loan returns by the electronics,

which had margins of 400%. And concerts, like a concert can make, the $250,000 I invested in the concerts could have grossed a million dollars. I was banking on every single thing to work out perfectly. I didn't account ever for the what ifs of what could happen if this goes off. So it was never like any time I ever told the law. or covered something up or did something in that sense. It wasn't to try to, you know, like enrich myself or steal money from someone to put,

like, say, a kit if I had a son or something through school or buy a fancy car or do something like that. It was just to keep the business going. It was this immature mindset, like I needed to do whatever it takes. It was more as a stalling tactic. So I could stall, pay other investors back, do this, do that. And yes, did we do stupid things like buy? a jet ski using company money and go on dinners and trips, yes, because I just figured that

was a business expense. Like we were paying ourselves. We were paying ourselves a salary by doing these things. Okay. I think we're getting a little bit far ahead. And I know you mentioned that you don't want to go like super, super in depth because of time. But you, when you went from party promoter to investor yourself, that's when the problems began. Because now all of a sudden, like, you know, like just because you have business acumen and party promotion doesn't mean all of a sudden you're going to be successful in selling electronics and selling clothes online. But you thought that, you know, you had the world by the balls and had it all, right? So you have all this money.

And you've, at 18, when you literally just failed on a string of shows after Wiz Khalifa bailed, and you failed on a string of shows and lied for the first time, then that's when you raised $500,000. I basically created another business that was, I still never recovered from my first business. In my head, I'm like, okay, I want to be an investment company. And I've raised this money that were structured as loans. You know, you loan us this money and I will repay that loan with an interest rate. And I figured as a loan, I could do whatever I wanted with the money. In my mind, you could take a loan from a credit card to pay off another credit card. So why couldn't I take a loan from you to pay off another loan that was coming due? And this understanding of business was,

you had this understanding of business at 18. All developed on my own. That's the part. That's the part. To me, it's like, you know, okay. What are you doing for work at this time other than just seeking investments? And how do you open a new nightclub when you are essentially, your business has a ton of investment money, but you're broke?

Well, so for work, I quit the Matrix. I was working at the Matrix Corporate Center up until the time I was 18. That whole time since you, since you impressed them at 15 years old at the Matrix Center, you were working at the Matrix Center the whole time? I was working for them. I was working for my dad. I was going to high school, starting my own business at the two. And I was doing like I was like the school cafeteria lunch lady, you could say,

for one of their other schools that they were like managing. And I was, I did everything. Like I left high school a semester early, ended up having to sue the high school to get my diploma. that's another crazy story. So what were you doing for work at that time and how do you, what makes you have the idea to open and own a net club? So for work, I'm just taking company money,

which is essentially other lenders money because the business isn't generating profit. Like our business structure was taking all this money and put it into future investments. We'd never had good cash flow. That was another thing. There was never any revenue from something that could, produce revenue now. It was always long term. Like if you book a concert today, you're not seeing the

revenue of it from from it tomorrow. So you were paying yourself a salary that was basically coming out straight out of investors money because you weren't generating cash flow daily. And I was just thinking, okay, I could just use my prospective profits from later on. Of course. And that's actually, that's standard. Yeah, I would say it's standard. If you're a startup and you get investor money and you're working 24-7 for this business, you can be paid by the money. Which is why we were buying jets because I was still living at home. But I mean, like, yeah. Why we were buying Jetsky? No, like I bought a jet ski. We did dinners, stuff like that. I just, that's what we did, you know, like did, I would say out of all the money I've ever came

into touch with probably $75,000 to $100,000 were spent, you know, not, um, it's just like a gray area of whether it was legit or not for spending. Expenses. Expenses account. Yeah. All right. So let's just kind of like summarize. You open the nightclub because you want something that generates constant cash. Which is why, yeah. So the nightclub tuxedo junction, I hadn't done promotion. This is 2013. I had been done with that place for a year and a half now. But you used to throw parties there. Used to throw parties. This is 2013. I'm 18 years old. I'm in Vegas on a family trip with my parents. Okay. Our business is now called WB Investments for Robill and B. My business partner's John Robel. And we're, our last names is W&B investments because we're like this investment company.

initially it's WB wholesale when we start like the wholesale business okay and I'm just thinking okay I want to be like this hedge fund manager type person an article comes out famous tuxedo junctions closing its doors after you know 30 or 40 years I call the owner Al who I was good friends with stayed in touch with and I said Al you know like I want to buy I want to buy the building or whatever like I want to get involved in this because I figured I didn't know anything about the nightclub business like operations, but I figured that would solve my cash flow problems. Did Al own the building or did he rent that space? Al didn't own any of the buildings he just owned the business.

So you wanted to buy the business? I didn't know what I wanted to buy. Like I wanted to have the name Tuxedo Junction. Right, right, okay. I go and meet them when I get back. I come up with the idea. I don't know how I came up with the name Skybar, but I just thought I would be cool. And we work out a deal where I would pay, because they were folding the operation down.

It wasn't generating any money anymore. That was that they were ready to walk away. I didn't buy the business and I never bought the building. So a lot of people say, how does an 18-year-old own a nightclub? Well, it was easy. I just took over the business. You didn't have to pay for it. I just paid $20,000 to pay the insurance off that was owed.

Pay the liquor license for six months that you have to pay up front. And then I put $100,000 into renovations where I was literally... Bonjour, compadre. It's the... Price line negotiator. How do I negotiate so many great travel deal? My Greatest Gadget. The Price Line app.

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because the news was publishing articles, this and that, and they would just try to take advantage. Anything, any work I got done was probably triple for me in price. $100,000 doesn't sound that insurmountable in renovating. How many square feet? Well, so the place was already built out

was turnkey. So when we're saying $100,000, it's new windows, new painting, furniture and shit. What about structural? No, no structural changes. They didn't build a bar. They didn't change walls.

I redid like behind the bar, but all together, this was crazy. And I repainted the deck. It was a lot of money for what we were doing. My vision for this was turning it into an upscale nightclub in Danbury. Now, you said Skybar. This is Skybar. This is Skybar. So there's three parts of Tuxedo Junction.

Okay, so it's split up. It split up into three different rooms. I took over just the front room and turned that into Skybar. And nothing overwhelms you at this point. It's just another day in the life. Yeah, I mean, I'm flowing. I have investors pressing me for money, but nothing's really bad yet, you know? Are you like out of body?

Like, are you like just seeing yourself walking around just making moves thinking that money is fake? Like, I think I just, I had so much money and there was no accounting. Like, I just always had access. And I always got very, very lucky on days where funds were running low in the company account. I would get a call from a new investor saying, hey, I want to give you a 50 grand. Like, I was literally going to dinners. I would meet up with friends at Chipotle. and they would hand me cash for an investment. And I'm just carrying around these blank contracts to

have ready with me. I'm driving around a Mustang convertible. You're just collecting people's money all over Danbury, Connecticut. Basically, and all over Rhode Island, it was a lot of people from Rhode Island too. At 18. At 18. Yeah. You're just going right. Where do you live at this time? I'm still living with my parents because I was never home. So I never needed to get my own place. Did your brother, Skyler, want some money out of the name for Skybar? No, Skyler didn't want anything. I was just, I don't know, like I was driving around limos too on trips. I would take my friends on trips. Like that were business associates.

So I figured it was a business expense. And we're doing this whole thing. And it's just like this crazy, crazy period of time. And then, you know, Skybar ends up not bringing in the cash flow that I expected it to. We just kept breaking even. Never was able to recoup any of that investment. And that period of time ended 2013. Yeah.

is when everything goes bad. Okay. Like a second time. Because everything went bad the year before, I bailed myself out. And then the second period of time, it goes bad again because this is when all the money is on the line. Like, we literally have half a million dollars in concerts. Did you check the bank account frequently? I was on the bank account every day.

Okay. So do you remember seeing more than $400,000 in a bank account? I remember seeing, you know, $550,000 in my bank account. Okay. And then how fast did that no longer say $500,000? Very fast. Like money, I remember. How fast?

So I deposited a check for $250,000 one day. And I think the next day there was $10,000 left in the account. And that was just because there was always expenses. Like when we're, if I had a wire, Tyga 60 grand or send big Sean 50 grand or whatever it was, like a lot of money went out. And so. And it was coming in just at the nick of time. So all the money. basically comes in in July of 2013. All the concerts are September 2013. We make it to the

fall. That's where all the money we're planning on recouping some of those funds back. We're going to make profit. Everything's going to be good. And I'm still telling lies to stall people or whatever because you couldn't keep up with a 60-day return on investment to individuals that or to people just relying on concert funds because the concerts were so far out. So I had to keep you using other loans to pay off other loans, which gives it like that Ponzi scheme aspect to it. But in my mind, I never even knew what a Ponzi scheme was. I was just keeping the business to float.

The concerts come to tuition, they were all going to make money. Like I'm seeing the numbers. Everything is very profitable. But one bad thing after another happens and every single thing tanks. Had you ever felt a consequence from lying? I was it always just rewarded?

Were lies always rewarded to you? Yeah, I think I always got lucky. I don't know if you look at it as luck, but in my eyes I looked at as luck. Like I always was at the point where everything should have fell apart, I was always to get myself out of it. Like whenever I told a lie to stall, that was, it worked. It worked because at the last possible moment where like say it was dealing with like a drug dealer

or dealing with an investor that was about to, like stop funding me or whatever or an artist that was about to an artist agent that was going to blacklist me from ever doing a show. I always came up with the money. So I was always saved in one way or another every single time. And I think had I not been saved by the universe or by luck or by whatever you want to call it, you know, we wouldn't be here today having this conversation because everything would have just became to an abrupt halt. But it's interesting how the universe in the world works, whether it was just my relentless, you know, ability to never give up or it was just like whatever the world had planned for me to just go through all these hoops, all these obstacles and to literally get through

it every single one and like fire a gasoline kept getting poured on this on this fire. So quick answer, at this time had you been being investigated or not yet? No investigation yet until all the shows bombed. And these are shows like with Chief Keefe, not with Chief Keefe, Tyga, you know, big, big names in the business. They all failed. And we could sit here talking forever going about why they failed,

but essentially they all failed for one reason artists not showing up or, you know, not selling enough tickets or this and that or whether yada, yada, yada, they fail. And at that point, it's December 2013 with interest, I owed like $1.2, $1.3 million to investors. And the kids who think that they have, these are kids that are 17, 18, 19 years old that think their whole life savings is in my hands

because if they invested $2,000, then they kept rolling it over. It's now $20,000 at the new rate of return. They're not getting their money. They're going to college. They want their money. They go to the police station. Before we get into all that,

just tell me one of the craziest stories from the nightclub? I would say, you know, during the Sky Bar Day, so there's two periods of time. One is like during the Tuxedo Junction Days, which we'll get two when I open up the back room and own the nightclub for the second time. But the first time, I would definitely say was when I needed more cash to fund the nightclub, Skybar, and I started dealing with shady investors. I would go to drug dealers, biker gangs, and I would get cash, and they would give me, you know, 50, 60, 70, 100 grand cash.

And I was basically using that money to insert it as cash flow into my business. And one time I owed this drug dealer like 150K and that was with the interest on it. And I was ducking his calls and avoiding him. And he brings me, he shows up one day at the nightclub and he brings me it to the basement. and he takes a screwdriver the end of it and he just starts whacking my fingers with it because he wanted his money and my fingers were like turning black and blue

and I think that's when like I realized like I was in fucking deep into this whole situation and those were just like some of the scary times like it went from me having this legit business to now dealing with shady investors and I was never involved in that world I never like dealt drugs on that level

like I dealt weed in middle school, but it was just, it was a very crazy time. And it just kind of showed the lengths and the depths I went to to try to make this all work. Like I had to go against my own moral values to make this work. So you said you felt relief the day that you finally got arrested. Had you ever seen a light at the end of the tunnel? Did you see a way out of this? or did you consider that you were going to go to jail? I never, well, going back to when like the investigation started, this is January 2014, local police start investigating me. And I was very much convinced that I had not done anything criminally wrong.

You know, did I make mistakes and lose money? Yes, but in my eyes, nothing was intentionally done wrong. I didn't set out to commit a crime, which is like the basis of, fraud. I didn't I wasn't like they were throwing names like I was Bernie Madoff or any of these big scam names and I'm just sitting there like that wasn't me. So when did you actually come to find out that they that local police were investigating you for fraud? January 2014 they call me asking to like set up a meeting and I just called you. Yeah I go there with a lawyer and um this investigation begins and it eventually you know gets picked up by the feds for whatever reason. So,

Some detective had a very much a hard on like in every story, like the Welf of Wall Street or whatever, you have that antagonist detective. He gets it all the way up to the federal level. And I remember going into an interview one day with the postal inspectors or like with the Department of Banking. And I went in and just for this eight-hour deposition without a lawyer, just trying to explain my story.

Like I give them names. I give them all the bank records. I give them everything. Like not knowing. I'm literally just, I'm 18 years old about. to turn 19, just trying to clear my name because it was an accident. When I explained this whole story to everyone, like it wasn't intentional, it was a big

accident. And I was just saying, hey, I fucked up. And this is what happened. And they took that and ran with it. Is that when you unknowingly incriminated yourself and lied to postal inspectors? Yeah. I think it didn't help my case, though, that I gave this whole testimony because they had everything.

They had my whole story. and I connected the dots for them. At that time, they had no dots. And then that's when postal inspectors meet with me. And that's when I found out I was under investigation by the FBI, postal inspectors, everything like that. And that's when, you know, this is June 2014 when the Fed's investigation start. Now, when that investigation starts, the business is defunct. WB wholesale, WB investments, there's no concerts, nothing. Everything's done. I get the idea,

because I'm not someone that just rolls over and plays dead. I wasn't thinking, okay, I need to go hide and I need to do this. I need to do that. So that bank account that had half a million dollars in, it went down to zero and you closed WB investment. It was negative. I think all my accounts were overdrawn by like thousands of dollars. And there's a whole group of investors that are standing there with their hands. I have investors after me. I have drug dealers and biker gangs after me and there was a lot of pressure like my phone was constantly ringing and i get this idea to open up the back and by this point in time sky bars folded to we closed it down wasn't working so you don't even have any ownership of that location anymore i have dilly squat

and i get the idea to go back to my roots i'm thinking i have this big whiteboard like you know in the scene the movies where the tech startup fails and they're in front of the whiteboard and they're trying to figure shit out, I get the idea to reopen Tuxedo Junction, the whole room, the whole space. I said, listen, this is what worked for me in the past, why not go back to that? Because every time I strayed away from what I was good at and what I knew how to do and trusted other people, it didn't work out. So I convinced the owners of the building to give me free rent for a couple months in exchange, I'd clean the place up. Now this is, I'm back into grind mode. I'm cleaning the whole place by myself. I have a couple friends helping me out. I'm painting it. I'm getting

all the old equipment out. And it's like the shell now. It's an open shell. And my idea was turn it into a warehouse electronic dance music venue, a EDM venue. Are you, when you say like, I sat everybody down, like, you know, okay, you talk to Al or the owners of the building about tuxedos, but like within your business, are you, are you still wearing a suit to work? Is, are you sitting everybody down in a back room, a dark back room and you're having a board meeting about how you're about to blow up tuxedo junction and reopen it? Like, who's there? It's just me.

Like, I had me and a couple friends at this point, I was never into clothes. Like, yes, I wore the suit and tie in high school just because I was, um, thinking that's what you did in business. Okay, so you're not dressing up. No, my attire was always the same thing. was a black t-shirt and cargo shorts. That's what I wore, even in the winners. We had bought like Gucci clothes one time.

It wasn't for me. I was never into the designer clothes. I wasn't motivated by that. I wasn't motivated by money. Okay. So you, let's say you start at Tuxedo, right? You start it. They're giving you free rent.

You're, who's there? It's just being a couple friends in my dad. Can you tell me who? I mean, there was just like friends from high school. And they worked with you or they were just hanging around for the part? I think they believed in what I was doing. I always, in every period of time, I always had people around me that believed in me. Like, you'll talk to people that were investors or, I mean, I think, look at it this way. My drive and my vision and my work ethic is the same reason why, like,

you and your company believe in what I'm doing. Like, that's what the effect I had on people. And people see me motivated and attached to someone. Like, they know that there's, you know that there's no stopping me and I'm going to do whatever it takes to accomplish that goal. And that's inspiring. Like no matter what the circumstances are, there's always going to be people that attach on to that, whether they have good intentions or not. So I was always, even in my lowest moments, I was always able to rally the support of people that stood by me in that sense. Most of the time, they would end up screwing me over or they would leave because they were in it for the quick return. But there were some people that stuck by. Did those people know that you were

being investigated by the FBI? So when I started Tuxedo Junction, because I kept the name and reopened it and turned it into this massive music venue, EDM with the biggest acts, the chain smokers, Steve Ioki, all this. No one knew I was under investigation. No one. What about your dad? My dad knew. Okay. But no one knew. Only the local people from Danbury that were directly involved in the case. But there was no single bad press, nothing. Okay. I'm running this venue. I convinced the artists to, or the agents to take a chance on me because I had these. The one thing I did get out of spending all this money on concerts was the connections. Of course.

So I had a track record. In order to book shows, you need a track record. So I was able to say, hey, I booked Big Sean, Taiga, yada, yada, yada, convinced an agent, I found more people to give me money and invest into helping me fund this club. Unbelievable. Only this time, it was just as a percentage. It wasn't any guaranteed. There was no guaranteed problem.

They were a percentage owner of the business. Of each individual show. I never gave up ownership of the business, just of each show. Okay. I find more people that were never tied to the original people. I do everything legit with tuxedoes. I'm keeping accurate bookkeeping. Basically,

every mistake I learned from my past ventures, I'm now applying to this. And you realize, this is your redemption moment. This is my redemption moment. My goal with Tuxedo Junction was to build it up and sell it so I could pay everyone back. That was my driving goal. Even in the toughest times when I was getting indicted,

when I was in court, everything, my motivation to get up in the morning, my why was making tuxedo's work. I put everything into it. I gave up relationships. I gave up. There would be nights like, you got to understand. I was broke, broke. Like, yes, I was in debt, like, by hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I had no personal income. I remember, and our cash flow was terrible. I couldn't make tuxedo work because if we had a successful show, I would take that money, which is good money, and pay off bad. debt and there was just no proper handling it needed to be its own separate entity and it never was so how long was the new tuxedo junction open so the tuxedo junction the new one ran from

2014 yeah um june to the day i went to jail in october 2016 now the first eight months i'm running tuxedos no one knew i was being investigated okay then in january 2015 is when i finally get indicted. Fifteen federal charges, wire fraud, money laundering, and making a false statement. And that's when the news has a heyday. Vice picks it up, every news organization. And it's catchy because it's Danbury nightclub owner or a teenage nightclub owner, because I'm 19, gets arrested by the FBI. Let's talk about the day that you're arrested. Where are you? At the time, I'm a big gambling addict. When, you know, I didn't have a We can tell. We knew.

I had addiction. You're gambling with investors money. Yeah. I was a, so when people say gambling, they're, they're associating with, you know, like you were physically addicted to the casino.

And I always denied that I was a gambler because that's what I associated with it. But now being more mature and looking back on it now, I was addicted to gambling in the sense that I was addicted to risk. Like that is my now perception of gambling. I was a massive risk taker. So whenever I denied being addicted to gambling, it was I denied going to the casino because I could turn it on and off. Like I wasn't at the point where I needed to take every dollar and go to the casino. But I was doing that though because my game of choice was backer at and I was damn good at it.

And a lot of it was luck because it was an electronic machine. But I would be able to, you know, go there with 500 bucks and win 20, 30, 40,000 dollars in a night. And that would bail me out of a lot of situations with the dangerous people with, concert agents with whatever. So that night, it was like January 8th, I think, 2015. I'm 19 years old. I'm coming back from the casino, get back at 5 a.m. And then like, I'm just about to go to bed, banging, loud banging on the door. I'm looking outside the window. Places swarmed outside with, you know, FBI agents, IRS agents, tactical vest, guns, a whole nine yards. They arrest me. They come into my room. I'm in boxers, shirtless.

They have me put on clothes. And in that moment, I gave up my password to my iPhone, which was the stupidest thing I could have ever done. I'm just like the adrenaline. When you're getting arrested at that young age, like you really just don't, you like your heart stopping. Like you're just like, I didn't know what to expect. And I gave up my password.

And at that point, I had been arrested by local authorities for liquor violations, driving without a license. So I figured that was this. I didn't know it was the indictment case because we had been in talks with the U.S. attorney saying that I could turn myself in. Well, they lied and they wanted to make a big spectacle of it. They weren't going to let me turn myself in. I'm dragged to the courthouse.

We have a bond hearing. My dad posted a $250,000 bond, which isn't physical money. It's just you go there, you sign your name where they could go after your assets if I were to run and disappear. So your dad put your house. on the line for your bond. Essentially, yes. And I got out that same day, and now I'm this charged teenage,

I'm 19 years old running the biggest music venue in Connecticut for electronic dance music while now facing 15 federal charges. Did you have a sense during this time when you were out on bail that your reputation was having an effect negatively on your family? because they supported you and didn't stop supporting you once you got arrested, correct?

Yeah, my, you know, my arrest definitely, like, hurt my family. I think people just looked at them different. But there's also, I think there's two different categories for this, because one, you have the people in Danbury that knew of the case or knew of me that are looking at them in some type of way. But then you also have this huge following of people that are still going to the club, knew nothing about the past, and think that the frauds associated with the club

because they didn't know about the past. The past was never out there. But I definitely think that my parents were put into the spotlight in a way like they didn't want to or didn't deserve to be put out there. And, you know, anytime your son or daughter gets arrested, it puts the parent in the hot seat. I mean, look at like any type of murder case

or sex case or anything like that. the parents are put in the limelight, you know, and there's a lot of either blame on the parent or there's a lot of like criticism. And it's just, I don't know if that's necessarily like fair treatment. Like basically people say in prison like the people that are there for you, your family or whatever, they're doing your time with you because they're put through that there and during that. Okay. So we're going to talk about the trial and the plea deal. But your mom. We never talk about your mom. You know, your dad's, around the studio all the time. He's a big personality, but he seems like he's kind of like,

you know, he's solid. And you always talk about your dad. Two questions. Did you ever cry during this process? And did you ever see emotions from your mom regarding, what were your mom's emotions during this time? Now, my mom is very, I think she's now, after all these years, because this was a lot of trauma for her, like having her son get arrested, um, going through all this. it was hard for her to, for me, for her to see me not go to college because that's how she was raised, whereas my dad was more raised. It's like the black sheep. There's different paths in life. So this was all new to her. But it was very hard for her emotionally to see me go through all this, go to prison. My mom's a very, you know, emotionally intelligent woman aside from being, you know,

brain smarts and intelligent on that level. So I get my emotional. intelligence from her in that sense, whereas like my dad, he's more thick-skinned, he doesn't really show emotion in that sense. But there were a lot of times, like, I was sitting in my car, breaking down and crying, because I didn't, I didn't really want to live anymore. Like, I knew I had to live. Like, I never got to the point where I was going to go and physically commit suicide or anything.

But there was nights, like, I would just literally sit there crying in tears, and I would be on an emotional level with her where she would see that. because everything was tough. Like I had all these investors. I felt terrible every single day that people, my friends had lost money. I mean, I still feel like that to this day. And there's still times like now where like I'll just get emotional.

Like if I'm listening to like an emotional speech or just like anything in general, knowing the struggles I've dealt with, the struggles I still face, like that's fucking emotional. And like I'm very sensitive in that regard. Like I'm a sensitive. person and I'll just think about things and I'll cry and I'll let it out because like that hurts like that's a pain that's a trauma and I think that's the traits I got from my mom whereas my dad I got like the work ethic I got the work ethic from him I got the personality from my dad because he's a

big personality in that sense so was there ever a moment where your dad or your mom or your brother like freaked out on you like Ian what the fuck are you doing no my parents never freaked out on me You never got slapped across the face. They were always very supportive. And the thing with my parents is because everyone always poses the question. We covered this in my dad's interview too. Like, where were your parents? And I left them out of it.

They gave me, and I'm happy they did this, the room to grow and spread my wings and fly and do things. Where I went wrong was maybe not having a business consultant or a mentor in that sense. But it wasn't on my parents for me to go and like find that with them. I needed to go and have other people step in in that regard. The one thing that really stuck out to me about your dad's interview, and that was months ago, was when he said, he said,

the investigator asked me, I'm talking from your dad's perspective, the investigator asked me, did you loan your son money? And your dad's like, I said to him, do you loan your kid's money? No,

if your kid needs something, he was there to support you. And it's not alone. It's like he was just, he was supporting his kid however he could, whether it was emotionally or financially at times. And I'm not saying that in a negative way. I'm saying that that's very telling of the relationship within your family.

So cool. Do you go to trial and do you take a plea deal? So after I get indicted, I'm released on bond and I'm still running the club. I'm done with gambling at this point. I'm not going to the casino. currently, and this is the year of 2015. They offer me a plea deal.

I think it was like anywhere from three to five years, and I had a private lawyer, and he didn't believe I was guilty. And I didn't believe I was guilty. And my dad and my parents didn't believe that I intentionally set off to defraud anyone. We were happy to plead guilty if it was no jail time, like admitting that there was wrongdoing

and admitting that mistakes were made, that people were owed money. From the get, I always acknowledged people were own money because they paid a loan. They deserved to get their money back. It wasn't structured as an investment where they lost money. It was a loan. They deserved their money back. Feds didn't see it that way.

They wanted jail time from the get. Now, I'm 19 years old at the time. They were gunning very, very hard for me. And so we take it to trial. Do you remember your first time in trial? Trial is a full-time job. Like, it is hard work. Is there a,

seating with people publicly? Yeah, it was seated with people. I wish we got it on video though. It was packed. Packed every day. Even like the head U.S. attorney was coming to this trial. Like this was a big spectacle. Routers was covering it. Vice was covering it. And it was just every day. Like you're there from seven in the morning to like six o'clock at night. And the crazy thing about this whole trial, you know, aside from my age and whatnot and all these people showing up and the government has this whole team of people and it's just me versus my lawyer was that I'm running this nightclub while this is going on. I'm running Tuxedo Junction. I would go to trial by day and I would go throw a show at night on the weekends, like on a Friday I would rush back to throw a show,

doing whatever I can to like throughout everything, like my power getting shut off from not, you know, paying the electric bill, from constant raids of the police looking for liquor to you know, the landlords locking me out of the building some nights because I didn't have the rent. I was literally brought through. Like, I could come up with a whole list of every single thing I went through. Like, I went through some crazy, crazy shit while getting, you know, chased after and put on trial by the FBI, while, you know, doing all these things. And I never gave up. I always picked up, like, my situation could have killed a lot of people. Like, maybe from out. outsiders that I was dealing with or even emotionally. I never gave up. I kept to it. I stayed strong.

And what kept me going was knowing that in my heart that I was trying to do the right thing by paying people back. And maybe that's why I always got lucky because I always had good intentions. I never had a bad, you know, ounce of blood in me. Maybe that's why I'm, you know, continuing and having success now because the universe or God or whoever is looking out in that aspect. But that kept me going and just always having that thing to hold on to that I was fighting every single day to try to make this work. You're living a dream. You're larger than life. You're above the law.

Did you really think you said that you and your lawyer both didn't believe you were guilty. You're still running a nightclub. You're being federally indicted and you're on trial. did you ever really think you were going to go to prison at that time? I never thought I was going to go to prison. I didn't think I was going to go to prison even while they were slapping the cuffs on me to bring me to prison. When did you actually, were you shocked when you realized they were going to prison for years? So I was found guilty in 2015 and in November after like a month's long trial and like three or four days of jury deliberations.

I was found guilty on like half the counts and we won the other half. And you're in the courtroom and they read the plea. They read the decision, right? Actually, the first ones were not guilty in mistrial, so we thought we won the whole thing. Wow. The jury verdicts, if you look at it, is so weird because some were not guilty on wire fraud, but others were. But one of the basis is a wire fraud is you have to have criminal intent to defraud. So how could I be not guilty on one and guilty on the other if it's all the same time period?

So are you in the courtroom, like, everyone's holding in their breath and like it's almost like a sports moment? or is it like very long and drawn out reading? No, it was very, it happened fast. So your family's there. Families there. Everyone's on their feet. Everyone's on their feet. You could tell when those not guilty verdicts were read the first ones because they

started with those first. You should see the look on the prosecutor's face. They were not happy. Okay. And now how do you take, I know that you kind of envisioned this time as if it's a movie playing out, but take me into your head. I want to see it from your perspective. They're reading not guilty.

not guilty, not guilty, and then. You know what I can pair this feeling to, and I'm sure a lot of people can relate to this, when you find a girl that you like and you slide into her DMs, and you keep looking, I'm being serious here, you keep looking at that message to be read, and it's still undelivered and your heart's pumping, and you keep looking back on it, and you're like,

did I send it, did I not send it this and that? and then she reads it. And she reads it and she leaves you on red a little bit. And then she's typing and you get that like heart pumping feeling and the pressure's on. And then you get that message and you can't read the beginning of it. Like say it's on Instagram because she sends multiple messages and there's no way to see a preview. That's the suspense you're feeling when you're waiting for that message and opening the message to see if she said yes or no. That's how I felt at trial hearing or waiting to hear not guilty or guilty.

just like hearing yes or no to go out with you. You just compared being determined whether or not you're guilty or innocent in a federal court proceeding to waiting for a DM from a girl on Instagram. I would say so, yeah. Just because I don't know, just like the pressure. Okay, but I want to feel it. Like I want to feel where in, I want to be behind your eyes looking out. Tell me what it looked like.

The judge is sitting on the thing. Does he have the black suit on? Does he have the gavel? Your mom and dad are behind you. Your brother's there. There's a bunch of reporters in the courtroom. You're standing next to your lawyer. Are you standing up?

Like, are you breathing heavy? Are you laughing? Are you crying? I mean, I think it's just, I wasn't crying. I stayed straight face the whole time. And you still didn't believe that you were actually going to have to be imprisoned? No, I mean, even with the guilty verdicts, then there's the appeal process. Like, in my story, there's always something else that gave me hope, you know?

Like, you lose one. show, I'd lose on one show, okay, there's another show. I lost the court trial. There's the appeal. There was always something that kept giving me hope. So right then, hope, did they, after you were found guilty on however many counts, did they put handcuffs on you and bring you directly to jail? No, so I was released back on bond and I actually had several bond hearings after that where they were trying to revoke my bond because they had banned me from social media and I was still using social media. And it was a whole big thing.

I won the bond hearings and I'm released. And I was on bond for almost a year between sentencing and the guilty verdict. How old are you at this time? I just turned 21. I'm 20 when the guilty verdicts read. I'm 21 in May of 2016. Still running the nightclub, still trying to make it work. We're still booking big acts.

Cash flow is getting a little better. There's a light at the end of the tunnel. And then one day I'm called in for an emergency bond hearing. This is October 2016. And basically, the feds had found out that I was going out of state to gamble, which was against my bond conditions. I couldn't leave the state. I went without permission.

And I was going to the casino because I couldn't go to a Connecticut casino, which is where I was living because I wasn't 21 yet. I was going the casino to gamble because that's what I used to do in previous situations when I was in the concert industry to make money. So I was going to the casino to make money to pay off the concerts to try to keep the club going. My mentality was do whatever it takes to make the club work because at that time, there was no more investors investing in me. There was all these articles about me. So I did that. It bit me in the ass, and I got my bond revoked and put in prison. What was your first day in prison like?

First day in prison, so we were brought from the courthouse in a van, shackled chain, belly chain, handcuffed in front, given a cheese sandwich. And I was put in the Wyatt Detention Center in Rhode Island. My first phone call was to my dad because he had taken me to the courtroom that day for the bond hearing. and he had to go drive back because I wasn't driving at the time my license was suspended and he had to go back and tell my mother that her son wasn't coming home

and my first call was to them saying I need you like giving them a list of things to do with the club to keep it running because I had every attention of like trying to get this resolved winning my appeal to get back out like I figured the judge were just trying to do like give me a lesson

and scare me or whatever so I'm at this detention center they give you tan clothes you're stripped out tan clothing you're putting a unit and i was in the cell like for the first 48 hours with some guy that was just coming off of a heroin addiction and like spazzing out in the cell he was a young kid i didn't want to eat i gave him my food and he was just like trying to explain to me like jumping off the walls like a bouncing bean of what i was going to expect how much time are you sentenced to and what are you expecting so at this point i'm facing Eight to ten years at prison was my sentencing guidelines. I'm in the detention center for a

month before I'm finally sentenced. I'm in court that day and I end up the judge sentences me to 36 months at prison and one year house arrest and three years supervised release. I'm then brought back to the detention center where I spend a couple weeks before I'm officially, this is a private facility, a holdover and then I'm put into the actual federal prison system. the Bureau of Prisons. That's what happened after the sentencing? After the sentencing, this is now December of 2016. I'm 21 years old.

Everybody's favorite topic. Prison. Let's talk about being locked in as a 21-year-old Ian Bick. I had a very, very interesting prison experience. It wasn't just like go to one prison, maybe like go to a camp and that was the end of it. Like, and I think, I guess it was just like playing to the part where my large than life features or what my story was.

But essentially, I go to multiple prisons. So my prison story looks like this. I went to the Brooklyn Detention Center in Brooklyn, MDC, Brooklyn. I then went to Fort Dix, the low security prison in New Jersey. I then went back to Brooklyn. I then went from Brooklyn to Philadelphia. Brooklyn, New York. Brooklyn, New York.

I then went from Philadelphia back to, to the Danbury low security prison where I did time at. From Danbury, I went to Oklahoma City. From Oklahoma City, I went to Chicago. From Chicago, I went to Oxford, Wisconsin, where I spent a year. So this was all over the course. Out of the 36 months, I spent 27 months in federal prison. What was the most trouble you got into in prison? So I just gave you like the rundown of all the prisons I went to. Yeah, and the first prison I was at is at Fort Dix, which I would say is one of the biggest federal prisons in the United States. And I'm going to get a lot of shit for this,

but I compare it to a college campus. It holds, you know, 5,000 inmates. There's two sides. It's divided into an east side and a west side. There's different units. It's an old army barracks. You have these big barracks buildings, units. There's 12, rooms with bunk beds, six bunk beds. And it's just like, it's a whole civilization. Like, it's not like you're locked in cells. Like, you're free to roam around. It's within a fence and whatnot. But I thought this guy wanted to talk about the high points in prison. He's giving me a whole fucking layout of their whole, their whole thing. What I'm saying is I've given some background. It's just like this big, it's this big thing. And so you guys are in bunk beds. There's no, is there

bars on the doors? There's no bars. Is there doors? Is there doors? No, there's a door that's not locked. So it's literally like a college campus. There's no, you're not locked in anything in regular holding. And people are gambling. People are starting businesses. People have contraband cell phones. Anything you want, you name it you could get into.

So I start as this new white kid who is already getting checked for like paperwork because everyone thought I tell these stories all the time. We don't have to get into it. He's a chubby sex offender. They thought I was a chubby sex offender. Those are always the most viral TikTok videos I have. If you're just listening to the first time, you've got to go check out the TikToks. And all your other full-length content.

We'll go into those stories. But I was trying to get myself into anything. I was trying to start a little business, start side hustles. I was trying to run the gambling rings. Like, I was trying to do all these certain things. That landed me into trouble with guys that saw me moving around too much. Like, these guys that have been down for a while, they looked at me as, like, fresh prey. Okay. So how would you characterize your prison hustle? What was it? At that point,

I didn't have like a hustle. I was just trying to move around. Like I was nosy saying like who's bringing the cell phones. Like I wanted to get involved with something. I just wanted to do something. Like I wanted to find time to like I wanted to start like an entrepreneurial entrepreneurial venture. When I eventually made it to the camp, I would sell cheesecakes and run the blackjack table. That was my hustle. But as far as when I was at Fort Dix and getting into trouble, I was just moving around so much and people looked at me as like this white kid that had money and that I could be easily taken advantage of.

So what happened was one day I get yanked into the bathroom by these two guys, these big jack black guys, and they slapped the glasses off my face and they picked me up by the shirt and they say, listen, you know, we need, they give me their ID number, we need, you know, money on my books. you know, weekly. We need it now. And another guy, this happened on two occasions, there was that one. Another guy wanted me to smuggle him in drugs into the prison. Are you saying you were extorted in prison?

I'm saying that they tried to extort me. In that scenario, I never sent them the money, never smuggled in drugs, never did anything like that. I used my brains, and this is where the paying for protection part comes into play. I found the biggest guys in prison that were in that unit. And I befriended them, the guys that were in, like, I guess they're not called gangs. They're called prison cars. And I found the guys that I started to become friendly with. And it wasn't like, hey, I'm going to give you money to protect me. It was using the fact that I was this young white kid and using the fact that they,

didn't have much money, so I would buy them commissary weekly. And in other prisoners' eyes, it looked as though they were hustling me. These guys that were protecting me were hustling me, so other people wouldn't get involved with that because then you would be knocking off their hustle. So I was giving commissary to these people and they would look after me and no one would bother me because other inmates didn't want to affect these guys' hustles. But we were just genuine, like I like these individuals. There wasn't any agreement you're going to, to protect me if, you know, I pay your commissary. I was just like looking after them. They looked after me and everyone stopped fucking with me. And they also found out that my paperwork was good.

I wasn't a rat. I wasn't a snitch. And they also, you know, knew I wasn't a sex offender. So how far into your stay at Fort Dix did you start paying those individuals for protection? That was probably within the first two months. Really? Within two months, you already had the whole prison system internally figured out and you knew what you're going to do. And you just said that there was no actual conversation where it was very plainly laid out, but you just knew how to manipulate that system. Yeah. And looking back on it now, I could have avoided that whole thing if I just went in there and kept my head down. Like the federal prison system, you could go into it if you're at a lower camp and do your time without getting into any trouble, keeping your head down, this and that.

But because of my personality and wanting to get involved with everything, I brought that own. trouble like in most of my situations throughout my story onto me that then my time at fort dix comes to an abrupt end when one day i am our whole room is essentially picked up and thrown into the shoe you made multiple tic-ttox about being in the shoe what happened at fort dicks what did all you guys get thrown in the shoe what was that our room is raided one day and they do an investigation there's like these investigations in the prison system and they put us all in the shoe And they had gotten into one of the cell phones, contraband cell phones in our room, and they see this video of me and another inmate wrestling with each other.

So they figured I was being like assaulted or whatever. They put us all in in the shoe. Were you a good wrestler? No. No, it sounds weird when you think about it, men wrestling in prison. I didn't say that. Yeah, but other people do. So we get put in the shoe under investigation for like two months I'm in the shoe for,

which was terrible 24-hour lockdown. You get out a little bit for wreck, but they're just bringing you to another cell. That's an actual cell now? That's a cell. Not the dormitory. Nope. It's a cell, two-man cells,

like your typical prison setting, toilet, bunk bed. Sometimes they would even put a mat on the floor and have a third inmate if they were overcrowded. Wow. And after that investigation got cleared, they shipped me to the Danbury prison. That's how I ended up in Danbury, which is my hometown, which I figured would be great.

to be close to my family in my own neck of the woods. And I just remember driving through Danbury on this prison bus, you know, like passing my old club on the highway. That's just like a surreal feeling. I get to the prison. I'm on the yard for not even 24 hours before they lock me up and put me in the shoe again. For what?

A guard whose cousin I dated reported that I knew him and that it was a conflict of interest. He reported it. The prison deemed that I was, too close with him because I dated his cousin. They locked me up through me in the shoe in Danbury where I sat there for three months waiting transfer. Oh, so that's just because there's a connection between you and the CEO. So then technically you just need to be on hold and you can't be in that building openly with that person. I think you're the first person that understood it

that clearly that quickly. But yes, it was like Alcatraz. They had the actual bars, the old cells. That's when I became the prison orderly in the shoe because I wasn't there for an investigation. I wasn't there for protective custody so I could be the orderly. That's when the guard gave me the nickname Squintz and someone else gave you the nickname McLevin. And I was doing that and then they've shipped me out because at this time my parents are calling the prison every day. We have our lawyer calling. We have a state senator calling asking what the fuck's going on. Like, why am I in the shoe? Wow.

That really pissed them off, and they sent me to Wisconsin. So how long were you in the shoe on your longest? It doesn't matter where. About three months straight. You were in the shoe for three months. And I did a total of six, and that was split up between three prisons. What's the craziest thing that you ever saw in prison? Craziest thing in prison was when I was at the camp.

Fort Dix. No, I was at the Oxford, Wisconsin prison camp. And we talked about this in Billy's episode last week. but seeing inmates literally leave the prison grounds, like dressed up in like their khakis and putting on a scarf as like a bandana or whatever, running through the woods to go hook up with their wives, like to go to a hotel while having lookouts at the prison while on the phone

to say, hey, if they're doing a count or anything, and then running back through the woods and carrying duffel bags full of McDonald's, sushi, pizza, cell phones, protein powder, sneakers, bringing it back. Like, that was just crazy because the average person, I think that's what the fascination is with prison TikTok and prison in general is you don't know what life's like behind there. And my idea was of prison was never that. I didn't know this would ever a thing.

So to see access to all this stuff, the contraband you could get, the money that could be made, even the food that could be made off of prison food, it's like a whole life, a whole, It's like the obsession with different planets, you know, and is their civilization on different planets? That's what you could compare prison to because a lot of people haven't been there, but then there's people that have experienced it and it's this whole new world. So it was just crazy. It's prison culture. And, and, you know, I obviously know because I was present during the recording of Billy's episode, but, you know, people are definitely wondering out there, if you can run through the woods and take the day in a hotel with your wife and, and, run away as a prisoner in a prison camp.

Why are you going back? And I know that there's a really simple reason, which you're going to tell me, but like, the average person is thinking, I'm getting the fuck out of there. Why did they come back? I had a bunk bait that said he used to run out of the prison camp in Atlanta and go the zoo with his family for the day. His daughter never even knew he was in prison. He would just go to zoo.

And there was a hole in the fence or whatever and he would leave. But they come back because you could get a new charge for. escape. If you're caught outside the grounds, then it's an escape charge. And they don't want to live on the land for the rest of their life. Yeah, exactly. So that's why they come back. Okay. Let's talk about your chilling prison experience with a guard. Was there some misconduct that occurred between a guard and you? At the prison camp in Wisconsin, there was this prison guard that when I got moved to work in the kitchen, I worked in the bakery. He was the kitchen CEO. And, And one day he comes up to me.

It started off normal. Like he would just be very friendly with me. And is he wearing like a uniform? Does he have a baton on him? Like, what do these guys look like? No, in the feds you're just wearing like black khaki pants and like a polo shirt tucked in? The CEO. The CEO, yeah.

And they don't have weapons. No weapons. I think some carry Mace or whatever. And he's just hanging out in the kitchen because he's the kitchen CEO. Yep. They have a pair of keys on him. And he would, the kitchen ceos wake you up at 3 a.m. as the baker to come into the kitchen.

And he was always nice to me. Like, you would let me smuggle out, like, vegetables or whatever, cream cheese out of the kitchen, turn an eye. Okay. But then one day, he wakes me up and not my other bunkmate that worked in the kitchen with me, and he just brought me in. What does he look like? He's creepy looking.

Like, he's penis-shaped head. Smells kind of weird, very skinny. War his pants up very high. Really? And, um... So were you already weirded up? this guy before he woke you up alone early at 3 o'clock in your cell? I definitely thought he was weird, yeah.

And so I go and work in the kitchen. He said his excuse was we didn't need him that day, the other inmate. And so I'm working there, like I'm baking, I'm pouring the muffin mix in, and he comes up to me and he takes his hand and he grabs my ass. Now I'm thinking it was just an accident or I don't know what to think, you know, hold it or did he like really squeeze and hold on? He like rubbed it, like rubbed his. hand like a little pat like awkwardly right and right before then he had like brushed my elbow

i didn't know what to expect and then he's just like creepily like massaging my arm and i'm just like i don't know what to do because you can't hit him in that situation because it's my word against his word and what are you doing while he's touching you are you cutting onions are you cooking bread i'm pouring the muffin mix head i'm just i'm going about my business because i'm not a confrontational person and i'm just there like trying to be awkward and he finally stops and then that was it and I just I was weirded out. So you actually experienced what I'm sure you know, you know what primarily women may experience when there's sexual misconduct in a workplace or something like that. It's like kind of like a holy shit I wish this wasn't happening of fear almost like a frozen. Were you frozen?

I would say so. You were frozen while he was touching you inappropriately. I was just like really nervous. Like you could tell my face was probably getting red. And it was just like, like, I didn't really know what was going on in that moment until I had like time to reflect on it after. But I still just chalked it up to, okay, like that was a one time thing. Like that was it. Okay. And then like a few days later, we're in a walk in cooler. And if anyone that's worked in a kitchen before knows what a walk in cooler could be tight sometimes with the shelves.

He plants himself at the exit in between like a shelf and him with his like at the front of his body. faced a certain way. So I had, he had to, I had to purposely rub past like his groin area while I'm trying to squeeze out of this cooler. And during these altercations, no verbal communication is taken place from him or you. No, I never said anything because I did, I had done, I was traumatized by being in the shoe for six months already. And I knew in these types of investigations, if I reported it, there was a good chance I'd be put in the shoe. So you had to rub up on him to exit the cooler. and he put you in that inappropriate scenario. What happens next?

That was the final straw for me. I told my cellmate, he brought me to the other kitchen cop. We reported it. There was a big investigation. He was removed from the compound, not allowed to come up to the camp. They left me at the camp. And then I never heard anything again ever since. And you've never heard of that individual's name again?

Nope. The other campers told me after I left, he was allowed to come back up. I think they buried the whole thing. And he's back at that camp in Oxford. As of a couple years ago, I don't know if he's there still now, but I'm sure that I know like there was no cameras, there was nothing to back it up or whatever, but it genuinely happened.

Other inmates saw, you know, how he looked at me and what he was able to let me do, like with stuff. I'm sure if I even asked him to smuggle me in contraband, he would have. So even aside from those two situations where he put you under immense pressure, sexually he was also looking at you all the time you felt his presence after you knew yeah i think he was i think he was into men that's for sure like the way he looked at me and i was just like this young white kid and you know he just looked at me as that and he was attracted to me and is there

anything that you could do now or could you ever report him or could you like you know file a complaint with maybe the FBI through his name? I had asked my lawyer when I got out, but it's just like it's a lot of he said, she said. And there's, it's really, it's like just a dead situation. I don't know what their investigation turned up or what happened, but the fact that he was allowed to go back on the prison campyard after is not a good sign for a case anyways.

All right, well, since we're on the topic, I know we're trying to hurry things up, but it goes without being said what you've just described. basically is affirming the fact that, you know, sexual, what do we call it? What are we calling it? Harassment. Okay, yeah. You're affirming the fact that sexual harassment doesn't happen to just women.

It can happen to men too. How do you feel about that? I mean, I think you really don't even have an opinion of it until it happens to you. Like a lot of people say, oh, you know, that person asked for it, or which is totally improper and not correct and wrong to ever even say that. They make comments like that, but you really just don't know. I think on a bigger perspective, you don't know what that person's going through until you actually physically go through it. Like for me, that was just like another thing.

Like now I kind of, I don't even overthink it because I've had so much bad shit happen to me and I've gone through so much. But like that could have been a very traumatizing experience for a lot of individuals. Tell us about when you finally got out of prison. I was released in prison in January. of 2019. I was, I think, 23 years old, about to turn 24 that May. And I went to a halfway house for a few months. I'm on home confinement. I'm living with my parents. And I'm very gun-ho about getting back into the nightclub business. I thought my redemption story was finishing what I started. I felt like, you know, the nightclub closing and how it ended was not the end of my story and that I was very determined.

to get it back open and restart and do things the right way and prove myself. And I found out very quickly that that wasn't going to happen easily, that I wouldn't be able to take on investors, not that I wanted to anyways and that it just wasn't an obtainable feature. So I ended up going to work for Whole Foods. And I had worked for Whole Foods like the month before I went to prison. I had a relationship with them. They hired me.

And I worked my way up from a Hot Bar Cook, the bottom of the barrel. making $15 an hour to being a team leader in a couple different locations of the prepared foods department making $32 an hour and with overtime I would have made $100K last year before I eventually ended up quitting and while I'm doing this I'm either doing DoorDash and or working at a pizzeria I know how to make pizzas I was doing a second job I always worked two jobs while I was on probation or even helping my dad and I was just grinding every day like working my way up in the company, like working harder than everyone else, just kind of just proving like that, even though I had this past, that wasn't the person I was then. And like I was just like trying to knock down all those barriers of being like that former inmate.

And I also, for someone that's very much open about their prison experience now and stuff, I never talked about it. I was in therapy for a year. It was court ordered, but it was really helpful for me. We didn't talk about prison. I hated talking about prison. I didn't, I, I just thought there's like this, there's this, you know, demeanor in society where you just, it's something you don't really talk about. I didn't know prison TikTok was the thing. I didn't know people went on social media to talk about prison. And I was just living a quiet life. Like I had a girlfriend and I had an apartment. I was able to rebuild my life from working at Whole Foods. I got a dog. I got my own car. I got all my bills in my own name. I became totally self-sufficient for my parents. And I was just loving, like, rebuilding. I finally had a life, like a life that I wanted, like a life that it was so much different than my old life because I had never experienced that before of being stable financially.

And it, yeah. And it was great just to like rebuild that, have a girlfriend, a long-term girlfriend, just to be at peace. I think I finally found peace within myself after all those years of going through everything I did. and then one day I just got bored. Like this was last year. This was after three years of doing this, I realized like I didn't have that flame in me anymore. Like I wasn't myself.

This wasn't me. I woke up one day and two factors decided this, but I woke up one day and I realized that, you know, I wasn't where I wanted to be in life and I didn't see myself working at Whole Foods for the rest of my life. I feel like I had put my aspirations, my goals of doing something bigger aside because I needed to fulfill society's norm, like the government's, the government's view on me, everyone's view on me that I needed to just work the stable job, you know? I felt like that's what I need to be doing. And then it just kicked like, I'm 27 years old. I have my whole life out of me. If I need to go out and check, take a risk, now's the time to do it when I don't have a family to support. support, like maybe I want to get back into the business world again and redeem myself in that way.

And at this point in time, I had an HBO documentary made about my life, which I never really capitalized on. I never built my social media from. Like, it came out because I was so fixated that corporate life was for me, that I was, this was by calling the corporate world and I was going to work my way up. And then, you know, that day came where I woke up and I realized this was not for me anymore. And also at the time I was interviewing for an MTV like dating type show where I would have to go away out of the country for three months. And the timing was good because I had just got off probation. And, you know, things were really, um, it was the right time to do it. I just got my passport back. So that propelled me to quit too. I think had they never reached out,

I never would have quit. But that jumped me. I went in. I put in my two weeks. I quit. And that TV show ended up not even working out. All right. So you go from rebuilding a stable life to kind of flirting with the entertainment industry. You have an HBO documentary. You have a lot of notoriety within the community. But you said it wasn't fulfilling your bigger dreams and your bigger aspirations. So what was your aha moment that told you you wanted to pursue social media as a full-time job?

I was, I lived a quiet life while I was working. for Whole Foods. Like, yeah, I had the HBO documentary. I had Vice do a documentary that was on YouTube that blew up. But it's not like it gave me this instant spotlight that gave me hundreds of thousands of followers. Now, throughout these three years that I'm working at Whole Foods were quietly pitching my TV series or movie idea to producers and stuff, but it's not really going anywhere. The rights to your story. The rights to my story because HBO didn't buy the rights. And I always believed, and the people that work with me believe that there's something there on a storyline. It could be the next big series. And there's a lot of comparisons to me with like

Anna Delvey and Billy McFarlane from Firefest and the Tinder Swindler. And I'm the youngest out of that group. There's definitely a demand for that type of those crime stories. And I was talking to my good friend Mike Squires, who was like our video video producer for the tuxedo shows. And this was July of last year of 2022. And he said, Ian, you got to get on TikTok, man. You know, you got to start telling your story, you need to put a flame on it. You got to pour gasoline on it to get it out there because at this point, I'm old news. You know, there's no current press on me. There's nothing. And that was a lot of feedback we were getting from these production studios. They were like, yeah, you know, the story is great, but we don't have the time right now or we have other projects

or there's just, it's not there. So I set out to start telling my story on social media. I wanted to get it out there. I wanted to help the producers that were pitching it for me, give them some ammunition to give to studios. And so I started on Instagram posting and then I started on TikTok, and then it just starts blowing up. I remember my fifth video did 1.2 million followers, 1.2 million views. And I just got into it. I started posting once a day and that went to twice a day, and then eventually I started posting five times a day seven days a week. And I'm experienced this crazy growth and I at that same time I quit Whole Foods and I go from having the stable life to it being very unstable and you don't know where when you whenever you make the transition from having a stable

paycheck to not having a stable paycheck that's what stops a lot of people from becoming entrepreneurs and I think I got very comfortable with having a stable paycheck that I didn't have like that grind like I had a grind I had the work ethic but it's a different type of work ethic you didn't have to work 24 hours a day to make sure you knew how to survive and live at Whole Foods. Maybe you work like 15 or 16 hour days, but you're working for someone else. You're building someone else's dream. Tables turn where you don't have that guaranteed paycheck

and you have to grind every day for yourself for what you have to do. And I just believed it seeing a vision where my story writes sell, where I'm able to pay everyone back, where I can have a company again. And I started this business, I called it, entertainment for Big Big Energy Entertainment. And I was able to build a platform on all of my social media. And then I start thinking, what's the long term of this? How do I turn this into a business? Because I couldn't sit in my car telling prison stories and selfie videos forever. You know,

that wasn't sustainable. I can only talk about my story so much. How do I bring this to the next level, which is where I get the idea for the podcast. And I had always been anti-podcast for the longest time because the world is oversaturated with podcasts. I wasn't a business guru. Maybe I could have gotten to a marketing podcast, but the idea wasn't there at the time. How do I create an original podcast? And that's when it hit me to do this locked in with Ian Bick's show. And the hook of it is how do you relate prison to the average person. And you do that by taking an individual story that has gone through the absolute worst. Like someone, say JD, addicted to drugs, JD delay, addicted to drugs, goes to prison, has his whole life screwed up, comes out of prison, and is able to turn it around.

That's fucking inspiring. If you are someone that's an addict or involved in crime or someone that is going through a divorce, a job loss, a death in the family, whatever, you're going to see a story like JD's and that's going to inspire you to go the gym or to do whatever little thing because you realize that your problem is not as big as what someone else is going through. And that motivates you and inspires you. So that's the message of the podcast. We finally had a message. The hook is we want to hear about the worst of the worst of the criminal justice system what this person went through. But we want to hear what they did to overcome it. And that just motivates and uplifts people and that's where I got the idea with locked in. And then while we're doing this,

while we're interviewing these people, the videos are going viral, the podcast is growing at a pretty fast rate. And I'm thinking, okay, how do we bring this to the next level? Like, what else can we do here? There's more that can be done. And that's where we get the idea for the commissary cookoff because I'm a chef by trade. My dad's a chef. We have individuals who have went to prison before. Let's bring an entertainment aspect into this. The Lockton podcast is very serious. You know, it's not supposed to be funny. Let's bring some funniness to this.

And we come up with the idea for the commissary cookoff. And we start producing that. And it's just so interesting that my whole life, you know, everything I went through, the party promotion, all that, all the marketing skills I learned, the work ethic I have has prepared me for this moment in time. Like life has brought me full circle

to be in a position where I'm taking every single skill, every single thing I've learned from my failures and applying this to now. Like right now I'm very, very on top of my game. Like I'm on top of the accounting for my business. I'm on top of numbers. I'm looking at analytics. I'm looking at things I never used to think about before.

I'm taking calculated risks. Something I never thought about in my past life was, what are the what if, what could go wrong? So now whenever I take a risk or I make a decision, It's okay, what could go wrong from this? People that reach out, what are their intentions? Can they bring something to the table? I'm very cautious of who I let into my circle.

I'm very strict with my personal life about like not necessarily dating at the moment because I want to be so focused on my business. I'm trying to get a little bit of a better balance. Like with having a personal life too. But I'm just like on grind mode, man. Like I got that flame back from where I was running tuxitos and the club of I'm going to do whatever it takes, obviously legal, but I'm going to do whatever it takes to chase after this vision, to chase after this dream and put in that hard work to be successful. You've grown rapidly on social medias. It's clear that your obsessive work style is what has propelled you forward.

I mean posting three to four to five times a day, releasing three episodes of long form content. a week flying in guests from all over the world. It's been inspiring and we're happy to be a part of it at Q2.9. And this is one of those moments, just like back in the tuxedo days or the party promotion days that you're going to look back on and say, man, like, what was happening then? Like, who was that guy that all of a sudden hustled and brought a YouTube channel to, you know, 2550K, 100,000 subscribers?

getting paid to, you know, professionally be, you know, on social media. Last question. You were on the roller coaster of a lifetime back before you went to prison. Nightclubs, cars, women, exotic vacations, dangerous figures. You told your story. The superstar lifestyle, one might call it. And you've rebuilt your life now, but you're blowing up now on social media. And it's comparable to when you want.

once we're blowing up too, you know, in the nightclub business. What other elements in your life are keeping you balanced, which is going to prevent you from ending up in a similar situation to the one that you ended up in? I think that when you're in the field I am right now and what I'm doing right now, it's very similar to what I was doing back then because in essence, you are chasing that popularity. Like you want your videos to go viral.

You want to... And you're on track to live. that superstar lifestyle once again. You want to continue to grow. And yes, you have that like celebrity aspect to it. But I'm very cautious now in making sure that my purpose isn't to get that to get to that fame. My purpose, like what drives me, what wakes me up in the morning because like we all have bad days. There are days where it's, I'm mentally exhausted from posting so much where I'm drained. Like there's still some nights where I go to bed like crying because like things haven't taken off yet or I'm still struggling because I blew up my life once again not necessary in like a bad way but just like

from my vision you know like I have to struggle now getting a new business off the ground not having guaranteed income and I'm very rooted in the fact that I'm enjoying the process I'm loving the process I reflect back on this is something we talk about all the time. Like all those people that were like overnight successes, they had struggles too. They weren't necessarily an overnight success. Like we see this process. I'm enjoying the process a lot more.

And I'm just remembering the past. Like you don't you don't forget the past. You use it as a tool to know that that's not, you're not that same person anymore. And you use it as a remembrance. Like I know like if I'm ever finding myself like wanting to go gamble or want to do anything, I just remember now. Like, hey, this is what happened.

This is that outcome. That's not something I'm supposed to be doing. You know, if I'm ever thinking to myself, how do I expedite this or how do I take a shortcut? I just remember the past. And that keeps me on track. And knowing that like this is what I'm supposed to be doing so I could fix the mistakes I made in the past,

I genuinely believe that if this wasn't my path right now, if this wasn't my purpose, I would have no views. There wouldn't be any views there. I wouldn't be growing at the rate I'm growing now. I think that life has brought me to this for a reason, and I'm not at the point where you just walk away. Like, how do you have a YouTube page that's grown from zero to 25,000 followers in the matter of months,

and say, this isn't working, I need to walk away? That gives me the energy to keep following this journey, keep being on this path, keep putting in the energy, work even harder and harder and harder to make this dream work and make this dream, you know, come alive. So I'm just super focused on that and I'm super self-aware through all my bad experiences of what mistakes not to make and what not to do. I'm very upfront with individuals now when it comes to business, which is something I was never involved with before. I have no problem telling someone the truth or giving someone, you know, a fair deadline. Whereas before I was so concerned over whether that person was going to

like me or not by saying, oh, I'm not going to have your money for a month. It's better to to just be, you know, honest with them. When we first got into business, it said, listen, this is the day that I'm going to pay you. It wasn't like, oh, I'm going to pay you tomorrow and not pay you tomorrow. I've learned the value of, like, keeping your word and sticking with that. And, like, even we were talking about this a couple weeks ago about, like, when I told a guest that I'm moving their episode to this date and we ended up changing another date, like, I genuinely felt bad about that because I had that experience of what it was like to not keep my word with someone. And it's so important for me now to rebuild that because I feel like now the spotlight's on me.

And I'm really like not only am I rebuilding from the ground up, but I'm rebuilding my reputation. I'm, you know, I have a lot to redeem within myself. I have a lot to redeem to the world and I have a lot to show the world. And like this is, I think what's cool is that all the followers that are listening that are watching, they're following a redemption story here. Like they're a part of this journey with us. That's why I interact with everyone.

I take the time to comment. I stay up all night, you know, replying to comments. Like, I appreciate the value of every single listener, of every single person that's supporting me because they're on this journey with us to accomplish this goal. And I just think that once we get there, it's going to be a really, really amazing feeling. And I think ultimately, you know, to close out with, like, I want people to be able to look at my story to know what I went through, to know what I go through and to know, like, it's not, it's okay to not be okay sometimes. but what matters is that you know you're going to have bad days there's going to be times where you fuck up in life there's going to be times where you fall down but what matters is that you get back up you don't let those moments you know define you as an individual and you just go out there and you

prove the world wrong and you go out there and you use it that's what this podcast is about using it as fueled your fire and creating something good with it you know turn lemons into lemonade We already see this show locked in as a success. We wish you the most success. Thanks for including me in this process. Locked in is going to be a hugely consumed show across the entire nation. Let's do this thing. Ian Bick, thank you.