#162: Mayor

This week on A Waste of Time with ItsTheReal, we welcome one of the most notable and influential sneaker collectors today and over the last thirty years, Mayor, to the Upper West Side! Mayor discusses growing up in The Bronx under the no-nonsense wing of his bingo-playing, knife-weilding mother, watching big rappers roll into his childhood neighborhood to bag all the best girls, and how local kids fronting on his elementary school sneakers provided the battery in his back that led him to grow one of the most legendary shoe collections in the world. We talk early jobs at Blimpie, at a shoe store uptown, and in shaving crack down to make a profit behind the big dealers' backs. Mayor details going to high school with Fat Joe, investing in the seminal nightclub Esso, visits from Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes, Foxy Brown and Lil Kim and Puffy bringing in the highest bar night ever to that point, meeting DJ Clark Kent and wanting a stereo system just like Clark's, as well as the incredible circumstances that led the nightclub to ultimately shut down. Mayor gets into the reasons why he went to jail at 30 years old, what happened mere hours after he got released, how he moved past the street life into private business, and how publications, influencers and tastemakers made Mayor, as he claims, "fake famous." All that plus fatherhood, getting his driver's license at 23 years old, being overly honest with Mary J. Blige, his thoughts on the sneaker resale game, how exactly he got the new KAWS Jordan 4s, what animal Pusha T is deathly afraid of, and much, much more!