Unlocking Ian Bick

Bick, 30, has the unmistakably cheery energy of a youth pastor, even when dealing with the weighty subject matter that frequently comes up on his show. He is of average height, and broad. A Teflon-weight tee renders him shapeless, a chain with a medallion featuring his podcast’s logo decorating his collar and chest. The shirt reveals two thick arms sleeved with ink featuring classic prison signifiers like flaming skulls and spiderwebs, which share space with Disney characters and Harry Potter IP. He sports glasses and scruff, but neither does much to mask his distinguishing feature: a perma-flush of his cheeks and forehead that earned him the nickname “McLovin” in prison—also tattooed on his arm. His complexion gives him the air of both a grown man and a Merrie Melodies character. As Bick shows me around, I am struck by the impression that he’s simultaneously oversharing and withholding key details. It’s a transparent opaqueness I recognize from the few other times I’ve met people who are truly gifted social media brand builders. 

When he's not shooting Locked in in one of two studios, Bick makes self-deprecating skits from the set, part of an effort to diversify his content. The lion’s share of his posts are cutdowns from his podcast that he spreads across his TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram channels, which together account for some 1.7 million followers—one of the largest platforms in the prison influencer community. 

The sketches are commissary cooking videos or scenarios about everyday prison situations like charging a phone or getting robbed by a cellmate. The wardrobe department is a clothes rack on the side of the room; Bick might accessorize with an afro wig, though the characters he plays are white. 

What kind of responses do these videos get? 

“I'd say 50 percent is good, 50 percent is hate,” Bick says “Some people think you're glorifying. Some people find it really motivational.” 

Are the people who don’t like it offended by jail cosplay? 

“Yeah, pretty much.” 

Ian Bick went to federal prison in 2016, at 21 years old, guilty on six counts of wire fraud and one count of money laundering. Through his early involvement in event planning and Connecticut’s nightlife industry, he—inadvertently, from his perspective—operated a Ponzi scheme that defrauded his investors of $480,000. Most were friends and family members. 

Those sins weighed heavily on Bick. Along with his sentence, he was ordered to pay half a million dollars in restitution—a kind of nether debt, as far as the government is concerned. Provided you keep up with your monthly minimums, it doesn't fuck with your credit, and the state won’t necessarily garnish your wages to cover it. Bick viewed the number as both financial and spiritual restitution for an indictment that amounted to a red letter. In prison, he began plotting ways to pay it back. 

“I was always focused on selling my story rights,” Bick says. “I wanted to be Billy McFarland, Wolf of Wall Street, all these people that got huge book deals. I thought that was gonna pay everyone back.” Some 200 queries to agents, per Bick’s estimate, yielded no interest. “They didn’t believe in the story,” he says. 

In January 2019, after three years in federal prison, Bick was released to a halfway house in Waterbury, Connecticut, before moving to home confinement in March. In May, that became supervised release. Bick got a job at Whole Foods and by 2021 had worked his way up to prepared foods manager. Unable to make a dent in his restitution, he tired of that life and quit. He then tried his hand at content creation via car selfie videos, fashioning himself a nightlife vet telling war stories about his run as an 18-year-old club owner who lost money on shows with the likes of Asher Roth and the Chainsmokers. To survive, he drove for Uber, worked at a frozen yogurt shop, and ran his own OnlyFans account, which generated “about 10 grand,” he says. “My mindset was: I did what I had to do.” 

Bick has told and retold his prison story dozens of times, but he was initially reluctant to share it. When he eventually did, he got his first taste of virality and saw his way forward, toward a platform grounded in prison influencing. In January 2023, he launched Locked in With Ian Bick, his podcast. It was a rough start for the media autodidact. “My first couple episodes were horrible,” Bick says. “It wasn't organic. But I learned by watching Jay Shetty and Diary of a CEO and Rogan and got a feel for their questioning.” Today, Locked in is an interview show that blends human interest, self-help, true crime, and testimonial insight into the American criminal justice system from every perspective—the functionary engineers of the prison industrial complex and the human fuel it runs on. 

Bick was nowhere near the first prison influencer and podcaster, but he's benefited from several strokes of luck and design. Most critically: He was early to the video format, investing in high-end equipment and production quality as podcasts shifted from long-form pieces of audio content to bite-size morsels of vertical video. 

Within a year, Bick says, he brought in $180,000. More recently, he claims to have signed a five-year deal with a financing company that licenses creators’ YouTube back catalogs; the contract, he says, came with a $600,000 advance. In addition to the monetization he’s achieved through his platforms, Bick's picked up sponsors, and his podcast now runs spots for companies like DraftKings, Wayfair, the University of Phoenix, Adobe Express, and Chipotle. On August 16, his YouTube special with Mr.Beast went live: a contest in which Bick spent 100 days in a model prison with a former prison guard and took home $240,000. He expects to settle his restitution—now sitting at $200,000—this year. 

By Bick’s own accounting, his podcasts receive 20,000 listens within three to four days of their release, and his YouTube clips amass between 10,000 and 20,000 views over the same period. Bick says his audience is diverse. “There’s everything from teenagers to grandparents who have had someone affected by [incarceration]. They want to know what that person's prison experience is like. Or law enforcement, or random celebrities.” 

The episodes have bold titles meant to draw clicks. They cover a staggering array of experiences: “From Wall Street to Prison,” “I Killed the Cop Who Abused Me – And Went to Prison For It,” “Undercover Homeland Security Agent,” “Activism, Bombing, & 23 Years in Federal Prison,” “Inside My Mother’s Brutal Plan to Have Me Killed.” I opened Bick's feed on TikTok and picked a video at random; it was four days old and had 1.2 million views and 30,400 likes. The post featured a Tango Blast gang member, his skull covered in tattoos, graphically detailing how he hazed his “chomo”—shorthand for child molester—cellmate. It is a well-selected clip, and well branded. The word “chomo” alone breeds virality.  

Bick shoots somewhere in the vicinity of five to six shows a week. That pace is necessary because he publishes one on his various feeds every weekday. By his estimate, in less than two years, he’s recorded approximately 400 episodes. His brother vets guests (“anyone who has been affected by the criminal justice system”) from a talent pool that in America is near infinite. Before each interview, Bick receives a one-sheet with scant biographical information. He’ll then sit down with his subjects basically cold, with no pre-written questions, for their one- to two-hour conversations, which go up more or less as is. During these shoots, the only notes he takes are time signatures, indicating where he believes the most fertile ground for social breakouts could be.   

“I’ve read The 48 Laws of Power and see that as Ian's mentality,” says Jed Lipinski, who recruited Bick for an episode of Generation Hustle, an HBO docuseries he co-produced. “He thinks like an entrepreneur. He has that book on the shelf in his studio, but he told me he’s never read it, that he’s not really a reader. But in the book, one of the laws is [‘Create Compelling Spectacles.’] So you go to the studio, and there's a giant fucking poster of him in the studio smiling, like, with his arms crossed. And he did that as a kid, before he was famous. Like, who thinks to do that, exactly?” 

Nick Blanc, a Williamsburg, Brooklyn, jeweler, had reservations about Bick and Locked in, but appeared on the podcast last October to discuss his prison experience (and promote his own show, Blanc’s Gold). “You don't need a big name to get on his show, like you might with other platforms that are high quality,” Blanc says. Bick wants his guests’ full life stories, allowing them to present themselves as more than their lowest moments.

“I tried to speak from the lens of where I came from as a 16-year-old when I went to prison,” Blanc says. “I was naturally scared. I didn't want to focus on the older years, when you’re comfortable being a convict. A lot of platforms glamorize the violent acts and the ignorant stuff that a young kid might watch and think it's cool. I want to tell people that you shouldn't really go to prison, but if you do, you still have a chance to turn it around.” 

This focus on individual redemption is a major piece of the ideology of Locked in, to the degree it has one. “My whole platform is: I don't push reform, because reform requires politics, the politicians, trying to move a needle that's impossible to move. My whole mission is reentry, show people that they could change their life after prison, how you could set yourself up for success, because a lot of people in prison are there on probation violations,” Bick says. He cites his own arc—released from prison, working at a grocery store, and living in a halfway house, all of which laid the groundwork for his success—as an example of what’s possible. 

To Bick’s critics, this notion of upward mobility for the formerly incarcerated, most of whom do not share his background, is misleading. “One in five Black men born in this country will go to jail at some point in their lives,” says St. Laz, a 49-year-old creator from Brownsville, Brooklyn. Laz, who is Puerto Rican, spent six years in the New York State prison system for an accidental shooting. “These stories, our stories, they’re entertaining, but they’re part of Black culture and need to be handled with understanding and sensitivity,” he says. “It’s a little weird when someone who is not Black, not from New York, is becoming the face of YouTube jail stories in Rikers Island. It makes me feel like he’s in this for the money. And when any art is just about the money, it gets watered down. It ruins it.” 

Bick serves as a kind of gateway creator, Laz suggests, appealing to a broad and diverse base. “You should be able to interview whoever you want, but sometimes it feels like he’s bordering on mockery. You see a big Black dude on his show talking real intricate Rikers Island ghetto history, and through his platform, these stories are reaching people outside the culture. And some of this shit is tragic, some of it is funny, but if it’s not coming from the right place, there’s a risk of having people laugh at someone rather than with them,” or in people getting hurt. 

Others see value in those stories and the platform that hosts them. Erin Haney, chief policy officer at REFORM Alliance, a criminal justice organization founded in response to rapper Meek Mill’s 2017 reimprisonment, says the work Locked in does is incredibly potent, but stresses that structural problems demand an appropriate remedy. “It's also our job to build on that, to turn that moment of emphasis into a movement towards reform,” Haney says. “We have to be able to turn those connections and that engagement that may come from one person’s story to help understand how this is emblematic of many stories. That has to also mean that there is a systemic issue.” 

Bick knows creators who address the system writ large. “I’ve seen them critiquing me publicly because they don’t like the entertainment aspect” of my videos, he says. “So they’ll make all these clips about reform, reform, reform, social justice, the injustice is everything. And that gets no views. But I will post a clip where a prison guard is talking about how the women in the prison were getting no tampons and how dirty that hygiene was, and that'll get 21 million views on every platform.”  

With that sort of viewership, he says, he’s drawing attention to larger issues without having to make a statement himself. “I’m not going to be one of those people that are in D.C. saying we need to fix all these things. I stay neutral. I never get political.” 

Bick is scheduled to shoot an episode of Locked in the day I visit. The plan is to sit down with a guest named Ghost, a Puerto Rican former Crip raised between the Baisley Park Houses in South Jamaica, Queens, and New York City’s shelter system. Ghost is a confident, compelling storyteller. He walks Bick through his beginnings as a drug dealer at age 11, catching a crack charge at 16, and the overall struggle of his life, which culminated in him getting shot seven times as he met with a plug. 

One of those shots struck Ghost in the temple, leaving him missing his right eye; that side of his face is sunken into his skull. Over the course of an hour, Ghost is intense and emotional. At one point, he lifts his shirt and reveals a scar running from his groin to his collarbone that, in a moment of vulnerability, he calls a “zipper.” He cries at another point, passionate, pleading with his audience not to make the same mistakes he did. 

I found the interview moving, as Bick’s conversations often are. It’s important for Ghost and thousands like him, people society generally ignores, to have a therapeutic platform, a political voice, an opportunity to get this shit off their chests before an audience of hundreds of thousands. 

“Gang Member Describes Being Shot 7 Times” currently sits at 152,000 views on TikTok.