Kareem Rahma: Do what’s right, right now
'Subway Takes' host Kareem Rahma on his new talk show, avoiding creative stasis, and being compared to Anthony Bourdain
Most nights, Leah and I watch TikTok like it's television.
We sit practically on top of each other, our bodies perpendicular on the couch, our faces illuminated by whoever’s iPhone has more juice.
The arrangement has effectively depersonalized our algorithms. Our likes and views are decided more or less in tandem.
Occasionally a piece of niche content slips through — makeup tutorials and Olly the quirked-up white boy for her, album reviews and big titty goth girls for him — but for the most part, our feeds have zeroed in on a recurring cast of characters and themes.
Brittany Broski and Jake Shane. The 1975 and Taylor Swift. Los Angeles real estate and cat rescue societies. BRAT summer.
They all squeeze into the feed shoulder to shoulder. Sometimes, seated next to them, in a big suit and sunglasses, we encounter a man using his MetroCard like a microphone. People tell him what they think – what they really think – and he agrees or disagrees.
This is the magic of Subway Takes. Hosted by Kareem Rahma and filmed on actual New York City subway cars, the show-slash-podcast crystalizes the minutiae of everyday life, with guests like Charli XCX and Brynn Wallner (to name but a few) opining on topics to often funny and sometimes philosophical effect.
This week, the Takes team launched the first season of its new franchise, The Last Stop, which expands the popular TikTok format into a full-fledged talk show.
A few weeks ago Kareem joined Substack and I DM’d him asking for an interview.
Our edited and condensed conversation captured the 37-year-old at an inflection point. With nearly a decade of creative work under his belt, Kareem’s recent success finds him flirting with something verging on ubiquity. The result is a little like watching an express line whiz past your platform. Blink and you might miss him.
ES: How’s your morning going?
KR: Pretty good. I’m going to London tomorrow morning, and I have a show tonight, so I have to figure out how to merge those worlds.
ES: I get the sense you are incredibly busy at the moment.
KR: It’s weird, I know I’m busy but I don’t feel busy.
ES: Is it just that you’ve been keeping this pace for so long that you’re used to it?
KR: Exactly. To the normal person, I seem completely insane. People will ask ‘What did you do yesterday?’ and I’m like ‘I didn't do anything.’ But I look at my calendar and realize “Holy fuck, I did literally a week's worth of stuff in one day.” It’s not good. It’s definitely not good. In fact, I would say that it’s bad. Laughs.
ES: Maybe so but it certainly has allowed you to accomplish a lot in a short amount of time.
KR: Yeah, it was a necessity. I’m a late-stage comedian, a late bloomer. Starting when I was 33, I knew my peers and my competition would be in their twenties. I didn’t want to feel like some loser aspiring comedian, so I decided to jam ten years of work into five years. I guess that’s still where I’m at because I’m still in that five-year time frame.
ES: Totally. So why are you going to London?
KR: I am going to shoot a mockumentary. It’s for a brand that I really enjoy working with, but I’m not sure I’m allowed to talk about it. We’re also going to do some fucking Tube Takes in London. You heard it here first.
ES: Oh baby! You’re telling me you’re going to be minding the gap?
KR: Laughs. That’s right. Is that what they say over there?
ES: I believe so. They have a little recording whenever you step on the train.
KR: So instead of ‘Stand clear of the closing doors’, I’ll be minding the gap.
ES: How does something like that work, though? Is the Subway Takes team crossing the pond with you?
KR: Yeah, I use the same crew for Subway Takes and Keep The Meter Running and I’m going to use them for this mockumentary too. We’re going to tack Tube Takes onto a free day.
ES: How did you and the team find each other?
KR: Originally I met Anthony Di Mieri and Willem Holzer who are very core to my work. In 2013, I interviewed Anthony for my old blog because I had heard that he made this web series, Bros, and funded the whole thing on a credit card. He spent like $30,000. I was like ‘Wow this guy is a madman.’ I interviewed him and I liked his DIY energy. We became friends and we’ve been close collaborators ever since. I met Willem through one of my business partners when I was running my production company, Nameless Network. He was our intern. He worked at Vice for a while, but when that ended I was like “Hey we should do some more stuff together.” I brought him into the universe. We had a group chat and we all became friends. And then my friend Andrew Kuo — not the artist — came into the fold to help me think about media as a business.
Our most recent addition is this kid Rami Shafi who literally DM’d me a year ago. I ignored him at first because I get a lot of those DMs. But I needed a driver for a shoot recently and he was the first response. I really liked his email. He wrote:
Hi Kareem,
Hope you’re having a nice weekend. I'm Rami Schafi, 23 year old comedian and wannabe actor. I’m from Anaheim, California. I graduated from NYU in 2023, majoring in Econ. I live in Bushwick, right by Maria Hernandez Park. I’d love to help out in any way.
Thanks for the opportunity.
That sealed the deal for me. Like, this is not rocket science. I don’t need a resume, just tell me that you can do the job. So he’s coming to London too. He’s awesome.
ES: It seems like you favour directness, and I wonder how that urgency translates to your work as a creator. Or does it?
KR: I have two little mantras. They’re so funny, they sound like they should be on coffee mugs. The first one is ‘The secret to doing things is doing them.’ You just got to do ‘em. Literally. The second is ‘Do what’s right, right now’, which essentially means don’t overthink it. You can only make the choice in front of you, and that choice is going to be great or it will be not great. But either way, you have to make the choice. You can’t think about what happens after the choice. There are a lot of people who might disagree with that, who would tell you that you should be more strategic, but I prefer to open the door and see where it leads me, rather than try to anticipate everything that follows.
I think creatives get stuck in this self-doubt stasis where they’re unable to make a move because they want it to be a perfect move or the greatest move. I’m operating at a level where, if I have 80% of an idea, I’m going to go for it because the 20% that’s missing will reveal itself in the process. That happened with Subway Takes. The ‘100% agree’ and ‘100% disagree’ thing was just a natural reaction I had to the first couple of videos that we made. Now it’s a central part of the show, and I think it's a great part of the show. But I didn’t go in with the intention of creating a catchphrase. It just revealed itself to be this sort of game within the show.
If I have 80% of an idea, I’m going to go for it because the 20% that’s missing will reveal itself.
ES: I don’t want to strip away the magic but I’ve always wondered: do you know the takes before you start filming?
KR: For some of them I do. In those cases, it’s usually a minute before we start filming. It is all improvised. I don’t have any prepared remarks.
ES: What is your relationship with improv?
KR: I’ve always been a ‘Yes, and-er’. Even without the training. I think it comes from a lack of resources. Right? You learn to become more creative when you have less resources. I’ve had a lot of constraints throughout my life, so I’ve always just figured it out. When I decided to make comedy my career, I did all the improv classes, I did all the sketch classes, and I did all the stand-up classes. But it was always in my life. I was always practicing that attitude regardless. I’m not really worried about the outcome because, unless it’s death, it’s usually alright. Laughs. I do try to avoid death for sure. But everything else is just not that serious.
ES: There’s so much talk right now about a lack of money for creative work. How is it going for you? You don’t have to get specific if you don’t want to, but I assume you’re getting paid now.
KR: Yeah. There are trade-offs. It’s not a steady income. Sometimes it’s great and sometimes it’s not great. You have to trust the process and know that you’ve built something of value and that people are seeing it and will come back — or that new people will discover it and it will get bigger. But yeah, it’s a change going from being a salaried employee to making this my career at 33. It was never a hobby, you know what I mean? I said ‘I’m going to become a comedian now. That is going to be my profession.’ The minute I stepped into that class, I was working. For no money, sure, but I was working. It’s taken like four years to feel like I’ve made enough money that this can be my only job.
There is an illusion that creators or influencers make a ton of money, and it’s the same illusion that happened with startup culture in the 2010s. Like, ‘Oh, you just start a company, you’ll make $1 million.’ There’s this idea that influencers are just getting huge bags of money dropped off at their door. There’s a cohort of them that make a good amount of money, but I think it’s very niche. Pretty much just fashion influencers. I think those people do make a lot of money if they’re working with those high-end brands. Or if you’re hyper-specific and big at the same time. A tech reviewer who has 40 million YouTube subscribers, for example, is making a lot of money. Or if you’re general interest like Mr. Beast, who doesn’t even feel like an influencer so much as a Hollywood mogul…
So, yeah, it’s still very early for me. Subway Takes is only a year old and I’ve always treated it like a side project. It’s only in the past month or two that I’ve decided to take a real swing with this, to try and publish more videos or get bigger talent on... That’s all new. And it’s me thinking ‘How do I make this bigger, faster so that I can possibly make more money?’ Or seeing if another door opens up. That show is currently on the internet, but it could be somewhere else at some point…
I’m not really worried about the outcome because, unless it’s death, it’s usually alright.
ES: That’s a good segue to talk about your new show. Tell me about The Last Stop.
KR: It’s a 30-minute version of Subway Takes, where past guests come into studio and defend their take before a panel of experts and idiots. It’s like Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect. I call it the most sophisticated show about the stupidest subjects. We’ve independently produced five episodes so far. It’s sponsored by the beverage company Recess… I’m really proud of it.
The first episode features Jerry Saltz from New York Magazine, comedians Ian Fidance and Neel Ghosh, and author Brenda Cullerton. We discuss the topic of whether or not boomers should have their rights taken away after a certain age. Hilarity ensues.
ES: This is also coming as you delve into Substack. And I wonder, why get into the newsletter/literary game now?
KR: I’ve always wanted to build an email list, but I never felt the urgency to make one because I’m not a touring comedian. What I liked about Substack is that it is kind of a hybrid platform where it’s also a social network. It is a place to create and distribute content. It feels like a natural place to not only build a new audience, and build new content franchises, but to also have all my emails in one place, to diversify my offering for people. I have so many interests. I make music, and I used to be a poet and I used to write. There isn’t a home for that on Instagram and TikTok. So Substack feels like another place to express myself and, have some more good ideas.
ES: It’s interesting because so many writers resent the idea of Substack moving into video. But you’re the opposite; you make videos and you want to write.
KR: I know. I haven’t been on Substack long enough to know whether or not ‘readers’ want to become ‘listeners’ and ‘watchers’ because there are so many places on the internet to listen and watch, and not that many places to read. What Substack wants and what its audience wants may be at odds. Or they could be completely aligned. Maybe Substack is right that their audience wants videos and audio. I’m agnostic about the medium. I’ll publish anything. Video, audio, text, photos. Substack feels like an opportunity for me to experiment again from the ground up. I’m already established on Instagram and TikTok. I have to do specific things on those platforms or else no one will see my output. This feels a little like greener pastures.
ES: I told you this already but the poem you posted when you first joined Substack was very sick.
KR: Thank you, thank you. I like doing it all. I wish I could focus more, I’m not gonna lie. I wish that one thing could make me happy. But I just like to try things. I used to say that my hobby was having hobbies. You know what I mean?
ES: It feels like we’re living in a time of niches, which is hard when you’re a generalist. Or at least, I feel like it’s hard. I feel like I don’t have a niche.
KR: It is tough because you do want to go deeper. In my case, there’s either no time or I try something and I don’t like it.
ES: It occurs to me that we’re speaking on Anthony Bourdain’s birthday. It seems like he’s something of a figure in your life…?
KR: It’s funny because I never really considered myself a Bourdain head. I wasn’t watching his show all that much. I was more into his philosophy on travel and people and relationships. I was really drawn to Kitchen Confidential. And I think that’s because it’s an underdog story. Right? He started late, I started late. He was not a professional, I was not a professional. There’s a lot of everyman kind of inspiration there.
People compare Keep The Meter Running to Bourdain and it’s not something that I set out to do at all. When I didn’t have a comparison in mind. I didn’t even know the show was going to be about food. Going back to the 80% idea, I had an idea to hail a cab and tell them to take me to their favourite place. I had no idea that these drivers would pick restaurants almost 100% of the time. The format kind of created itself based on me doing the show. I realized it’s kind of a food show. But it’s interesting because I do think that that is probably the best compliment that I can receive. I think of anyone to be compared to, Anthony Bourdain is one of the most special people to have ever lived. So it makes me feel great. I’m honoured. I hope I can make him proud.
Kareem Rahma is a comedian and the host of various content franchises. He lives in New York City.