On the Move with ‘Subway Takes’ Creator Kareem Rahma

Earlier this year, the comedian and media personality Kareem Rahma decided to double the output of his internet talk show, “Subway Takes,” from two episodes per week to four. What he couldn’t remember was why.

“Ummm, I kind of was like …” Rahma said, trailing off during an interview at his home in Brooklyn this summer. “I don’t know,” he concluded with a laugh.

In his defense, it was a busy time. Including “Subway Takes,” a series of train-car conversations about people’s peculiar personal beliefs, Rahma, 38, is the creator and host of three web series, fronts a rock band and stars in, co-wrote and co-produced a feature film that premiered last month. In March, he welcomed his first child — a daughter — which, now that he thinks of it, had been the motivation for doubling down on “Subway Takes.”

“I thought, ‘I need to turn this into something that might actually benefit me,” he said. “Both financially and in terms of, like, a proper career.”

The gambit paid off. In May, “Subway Takes” was a moderately successful but niche production, with about 300,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. Now that following has more than tripled — over 928,000 — and both the show and Rahma have entered a new stratum of viral fame.

New Yorkers can be heard on the street and in bars auditioning their own “Subway Takes.” Brands including H & M, Urban Outfitters, KOTN and J. Crew have paid to outfit Rahma and his guests. And the status symbol of the season came in August — an invitation to interview both Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.

As he has gained access to famous names, Rahma has also faced new challenges, including how to preserve the populist spirit of his creation while building a successful business and tangling with more powerful partners. A “proper career” is a noble goal. Surviving in the content industry is a grind.

The Allure of the Take

The premise of “Subway Takes” is simple. Rahma, wearing a signature, oversized suit and sporty sunglasses, rides the train with a guest who offers, and then must defend, an unusual or provocative viewpoint. The ‘takes’ are generally entertaining and often absurd (“abolish shorts”), eccentric (“America has gotten soft since we stopped drinking whole milk”) or incendiary (“‘Ghosting’ is fine”).

But the essence of the show is the defense. In 90 seconds or less, “Subway Takes” (and, to an even greater degree, its half-hour YouTube spinoff, “The Last Stop”) routinely captures something that the average cry for attention on the internet never does — an actual human being mapping the nonsensical course of a train of thought.

On the day that I first met Rahma, he was preparing to fly to Pittsburgh to interview the vice president and her running mate. Although Rahma felt gratified to have the attention of a potential future president, he also had reservations.

Excepting the occasional celebrity (Olivia Wilde, Charli XCX), the majority of guests on “Subway Takes” had been relative unknowns by design. The engine of the show, Rahma pointed out, is the take, not the take artist.

Rahma also had policy concerns. As a Muslim and an Arab, he objected to the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians — including many women and children — since Hamas’s attack on Israel last October, in which 1,200 people were killed and over 200 were kidnapped. In three phone calls with Harris’s staff and the Democratic National Committee, he said, he had proposed raising the conflict with the vice president — perhaps at the end of the episode — but was rejected.

Because he is not a professional journalist, Rahma, like other content creators who have interviewed presidential candidates, isn’t beholden to common editorial standards enforced by traditional news media outlets, including rules against the exclusion of topics as a precondition for an interview. He ultimately agreed to the campaign’s terms, reasoning that he could choose not to publish the video if it made him feel uneasy.

Rahma is 6 feet tall, with a head of buoyant black curls, and in near-constant motion — either walking, talking, using his hands, or some combination of the three. “Subway Takes” is the second series he has created with transportation at its center. The first, “Keep the Meter Running,” in which he hails a cab and asks the driver to take him to his or her favorite place in the city, has nearly 500,000 followers.

Rahma considers that show — a compendium of life-affirming conversations with working-class and immigrant New Yorkers — to be his true calling. (The comedian and actor Ramy Youssef has signed on to produce a television adaptation.)

He started “Subway Takes” almost as a whim, after a conversation in the spring of last year with his friend Andrew Kuo — the show’s co-creator and a visual artist and author. Rahma wanted a platform for his comedian friends, and Kuo suggested setting it on the subway.

“It makes the subway and New York seem as interesting as you hope they would be,” Kuo said.

“Subway Takes” shares some DNA with a genre of “man-on-the-street” video that has proliferated on social media. A person with a microphone interrogates passers-by about their outfits, or their jobs, or their favorite place to buy a bagel. Often, the ultimate beneficiary of these videos is consumerism — viewers learn new and more exquisite ways to spend their money. But the revelations on “Subway Takes” are internal. In some ways, it is a closer relative of the “home tour” genre. In lieu of granting a peek at a stranger’s quirky bedroom, it shines a light on the dark corridors of their mind.

Rahma employs an assistant producer and typically hires two cameramen and an editor for his shows. He has been making “Keep the Meter Running” at a loss, he said. But, this year, sponsorships for “Subway Takes” have earned enough to support his family.

The Striver’s Inheritance

Rahma was born in Cairo to Egyptian parents and raised in a suburb outside St. Paul, Minn. His mother ran a day care out of his childhood home and his father was a serial entrepreneur. In Rahma’s memory, his father — who worked at various times as a gas station owner, a truck driver, an exporter and a vegetable farmer — was always one step away from his big break.

“I remember going to Egypt with him and carrying duffel bags full of Levi’s jeans or stacks of oil paintings that he wanted to sell,” he said. “He was trying to achieve the American dream and it never really panned out.”

Youssef, who was born in New York to Egyptian immigrants, said he recognized the Rahmas’ blend of optimism and hustle.

“It’s called being Egyptian,” he said. “In Cairo, there’s so much happening around you that it always kind of feels like you’re on this surfboard of life, just trying to grab whatever wave is coming your way.”

In high school, Rahma worked as a telemarketer for a furnace and duct cleaning company, at McDonald’s and as a busboy at the Pool and Yacht Club in St. Paul. While in college at the University of Minnesota (he studied journalism and advertising), he started a side business flipping motorcycles that he bought with student loan money.

After his father died, in 2007, Rahma stayed home to help his mother and two younger siblings. He left for New York in 2012 and pursued a corporate life in social media marketing at Vice and The New York Times. (In an April post on Instagram, Rahma accused a Times Cooking video of mimicking “Keep the Meter Running.” The Times said in a statement that the video had not been based on Rahma’s concept or work.) He later ran his own business — a video content company with 20 employees called the Nameless Network — but wound it down after a pandemic-inspired epiphany.

“I was depressed and I realized that I had been searching for a way to express myself,” he said. “In high school, I worked. In college, I worked. I never went to Europe for five months and meandered around or did any of the things that people do when they’re trying to figure out what they want to do.”

Effectively unemployed at 33, Rahma rolled the dice on a long-suppressed passion — stand-up comedy. One early supporter was Nicolas Heller, the film director and social media personality known as New York Nico, whose Instagram chronicles of the city’s colorful characters inspired Rahma to create a signature franchise of his own.

“I had had all of these ideas in my notes app,” he recalled. “One was, ‘A show where you hang out with cabdrivers.’”

Dreams Versus Reality

Two-and-a-half weeks after our initial meeting, I visited Rahma again. He seemed harried and wore a faded T-shirt and relaxed-fit jeans. The interview with Harris hadn’t gone as planned.

What happened was a dispute over Harris’s take. Rahma said he had been told that the vice president would be taking a stand against removing one’s shoes on airplanes. When they sat down, however, Harris had surprised him with a different take: “Bacon is a spice.” (Two senior campaign officials said this topic had been raised in advance. Rahma and his manager dispute this.)

Rahma, who doesn’t eat pork for religious reasons, was taken aback. “I don’t know,” he says, in an unpublished video recording of the interview, his voice rising to an unusually high pitch. Harris elaborates that bits of cooked bacon can be used to enhance a meal like any other seasoning. “Think about it, it’s pure flavor,” she says.

Rahma asks Harris if he can use beef or turkey and what kinds of dishes would benefit from bacon. He then pauses the interview and tells her that he doesn’t eat it. He asks if they can do the airplanes take instead. But, on the advice of a staffer, Harris decides to declare her love of anchovies on pizza — an alternative the campaign had floated earlier in an email. Rahma wraps the discussion one minute later.

“Well,” he says, with an awkward laugh. “I’m 100 percent unsure on both of those.”

The Walz interview, in which the governor deplored the national decline of home gutter maintenance, went more smoothly. Afterward, Rahma said, he felt unsure of what to make of the sit-down with Harris. He had been apprehensive about potential criticism from other Muslims, and the bacon talk had thrown him off.

“It was so complicated because I’m Muslim and there’s something going on in the world that 100 percent of Muslims care about,” he said. “And then they made it worse by talking about anchovies. Boring!”

The campaign apologized for the bacon take and proposed a reshoot. But, after publishing the Walz interview, Rahma ultimately decided not to move forward with it.

“I never wanted to be a politics person,” he said. “The more I think about it, the more I feel like I got lucky.”

On the afternoon of our second meeting, Rahma was returning to his comfort zone by filming an episode of “Keep the Meter Running.” He and two cameramen piled into the yellow Nissan minivan of a cabdriver named Afo, who planned to take them to his favorite Ghanaian restaurant in the Bronx.

Afo said he had emigrated from Accra in 1987. His first years in the city were rough — two men robbed and assaulted him with a tire iron at his job as a gas station attendant — but he found better employment as a carpet installer. Now 60, Afo had raised two children and worked as a taxi driver seven days a week for the past 17 years. He dreams of returning to Ghana and retiring on a small farm.

“I just want to live a simple life,” he said. “No more rushing, no stress, just relax.”

Noise from a dump truck in the next lane began seeping through the windows. Rahma, nervous about the audio recording, paused the conversation and asked Afo to pull away. His own simple life was still a distant fantasy. The cameraman next to him shifted his weight, stretching a leg that had fallen asleep. After nearly an hour, Afo exited the freeway in the South Bronx near Yankee Stadium. Rahma relaxed into his seat and looked at his watch.

“All right,” he sighed. “Let’s cut.”