‘I had one thing young people didn’t’: how Subway Takes’ Kareem Rahma got famous in his 30s

‘I had one thing young people didn’t’: how Subway Takes’ Kareem Rahma got famous in his 30s | New York | The Guardian

In 2019, Kareem Rahma sat down and decided to become famous. He made a plan that mapped out exactly how he was going to do it. There was just one problem: he was already 33.

I roll my eyes – “That’s a long time in New York years!” Rahma protests. He wanted to become a comedian, an actor, a big name among the cool kids, he wanted to be an It boy. To try that in your mid-30s in a city obsessed with youth? It would have been easier if he’d decided to become a gymnast.

“I knew I had to put 10 years of work into five years because I’d be competing with kids who were 23 who were way funnier and way better. But I had one thing they didn’t: perspective,” he says.

It’s now almost exactly five years since Rahma, now 38, put the plan into action. If this were his performance appraisal he’d be getting glowing marks.

On TikTok and

The first, Subway Takes, is the public square incarnate: righteous New Yorkers as well as occasional influencers and celebrities deliver one controversial opinion while sitting on the New York subway. “The government should pay for everyone’s parents to go to therapy!” “Humiliation is good for you!” “Restaurants have got to stop singing Happy Birthday!”

It’s a modern-day speakers’ corner without the crazies. Recent guests include Charli xcx, Jane Goodall and the former vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz (younger guests opine about dating etiquette and pet preferences – Walz’s rather more adult “take” was that “the most neglected part of home ownership is the gutters”). The idea for the show was simple, Rahma says: “Everyone wants to make podcasts so they can clip out the best bit for social media, so I wanted to make a podcast where there was no podcast, it was just the clip.” Those clips have now been viewed hundreds of millions of times and Subway Takes has certainly been the part of the plan that’s been the most successful – with Rahma batting away requests from huge names to appear on the show.

But his other show, Keep the Meter Running, sees him jump in New York taxis and ask the drivers to take him to their favourite spot to eat. It’s a sweet, moving portrait of the city, featuring strangely emotional stories told over stacked plates of rice by people who are so often treated as invisible by hard-nosed bustlers with somewhere to be.

If he was merely part of the coterie of successful internet interviewers that includes Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg and Hot Ones’ Sean Evans, I think Rahma might not consider the plan a full-blown success. But these YouTube series are just one part of his output that includes a Substack, production company and multiple artistic ventures. In the weeks leading up to our interview, I attended the premiere of his debut feature film, Or Something, a charming Linklater-style walk and talk (Rahma is both the writer and star) about two strangers who get locked into a day-long conversation. The premiere was filled with downtown New York socialites, photographed by the indie sleaze photographer the Cobrasnake with a post-movie panel moderated by Jeremy O Harris, the writer of Slave Play and Zola.

A few nights later, I went to an industry showcase at a hip Williamsburg venue and saw Rahma playing with his band Kareem Rahma & Tiny Gun, a Strokesy garage-rock outfit whose songs are marked by a tongue-in-cheek lyricism.

The core of his five-year plan was “to work harder than anyone” and “rebrand myself from a civilian to a comedian”. He always said would make short-form videos to get followers online, write and star in a feature film and do a live comedy show in New York.

So clearly, the plan worked and Rahma has become something of an old-school New York renaissance man, the kind you’d see hanging out at the Fiorucci store in the 1980s or on Ludlow Street in the 1990s. But now that he’s got there – what comes next?

Rahma suggested we meet at 7th Avenue Donuts & Diner, a rundown spot in Brooklyn, not only because it’s near his house and because the staff have a grumpy antipathy that seems to complement Rahma’s puppy-dog energy, but also because it holds a special place in his heart. It was the location of an early date with the woman who would become his wife, Karina. They met on Hinge, where Rahma’s profile mentioned he liked eating breakfast for dinner. They haven’t looked back since and seven months ago they had their first child.

Fatherhood is “pretty much what I expected”, he says. “I kind of approached it like I approach a lot of things in my life, where you just do it and then it all figures itself out. I feel like life is complicated, but it’s a lot less complicated than people say it is.”

Today he’s in a less romantic mood, recovering from an illness; he wears a large coat indoors and orders hot tea for his sore throat. “Usually I’m more hyperactive than this, make sure you say that,” he says. He perks up when our crotchety waitress delivers his food: “Why did you say you don’t have hash browns? These are hash browns!” he says. “We call those home fries here,” she says, which raises a smile.

Rahma’s projects stand out due to the strength of his personality; he has a manner that’s both inviting and distant, silly and casual. It elicits a warmth from everyone, whether they’re a New York City cab driver or a vice-presidential candidate. He says his ability to talk to anyone came from childhood, because English was his second language. He grew up in Minnesota in an Egyptian family where only Arabic was spoken.

“I got kicked out of preschool because I didn’t know English, and I would just cry every day.” After that his parents forced him to learn English at home: “the new rule was no Arabic in the house.” When he got to elementary school he wanted to avoid being the odd one out again. He was the only Muslim kid in a “very white environment” and, he says, “I really wanted to fit, like, really badly. I hated that my family was different, I wanted so much to be a blonde-hair blue-eyed kid.”

His desire to assimilate meant he learned how to speak with everyone. “At the beginning it was code switching. I was telling people we celebrate Christmas too, even though we didn’t.” But as he got older, the desire to fit in and be accepted by all groups evolved into something of a superpower. “I became more of a social butterfly. I was definitely cool. And I hung out with the actual cools. But I also hung with the stoners, yeah. And some of the nerds. If I felt like getting into trouble, I’d hang out with the bad kids. I became like a Switzerland, group agnostic.”

Even back then he worked relentlessly – he had three jobs while still at middle school – as a telemarketer, busboy and as a McDonald’s line cook – so that he could save up $2,000 for his first car, a purple Dodge Neon that he bought on his 16th birthday. It’s a classic second-generation immigrant story; by trying to fit in Rahma developed his own powerful sense of personality: welcoming, ambitious and open to all possibilities.

Sometimes, though, that sense of openness meant Rahma struggled to focus his energies in any one direction. In high school he joked that “hobbies are my hobby” because of how regularly he took up an interest and then abandoned it after a few weeks. At university he enrolled in “general college”, a since discontinued program that allowed students who weren’t sure what to study to take a range of courses. And he has consistently flitted between career paths. After stints making branded content at Vice (which he found a culture shock: “no one is mean in the midwest”) and the nascent New York Times video department, he launched a production company, published a book of poetry and at one point started a Museum of Pizza, a Instagramable tourist trap in Brooklyn that sold out for months. Was Rahma a big fan of pizza? Not especially, he says. He was motivated simply by making money, meeting people and being able to tell the story.

He says that things are calmer now, but still refuses to stay in one lane. “I used to have constant existential crises because I didn’t know what my place was in the world. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I was pursuing money over everything. That’s how I made all of my decisions. As soon as I stopped doing that and really started thinking about, like, what do I actually want to be, that’s when I became honest with myself.”

He says that’s actually how he managed to get famous late in life, by ignoring any sense that he might be embarrassing himself. “It’s so cringe to be like, 33 and be like, ‘oh, I’m gonna be in media now,’ but I don’t feel cringe anymore. I just do it.”

One of the only moments he’s paused for thought was arguably the biggest of his career, the Walz interview. He agonised over whether to do it, as someone so vehemently opposed to the Democrats’ position on Gaza. “I feel like I’m living in an insane universe. We have lost the plot. Long ago, I would say that there was room for discussion and I would respect someone even if they disagreed with me. But I just don’t know what anyone can disagree about.”

Ultimately Rahma decided to go ahead with Walz, who had previously called for a ceasefire and said that Gaza demonstrators were “protesting for all the right reasons”.

“I decided that he’s not involved in the current administration, and that was less offensive. He’s from Minnesota, and I’m from Minnesota, and he’s been more sympathetic to the cause at least.” But ultimately Rahma’s final decision came back to how good it would sound to tell people that he had the candidate on his show. “I was like, it’s fine, and the story is great. It’s all about the story in my world. I’m not gonna pass up a good story.”

As the five-year plan wraps up, he’s starting on a 10-year one.

And he recognises he might finally have to make some choices and commit to the bit, something he says he’s more willing to do. “I’ve been starting to think maybe I don’t want to be a writer, maybe I don’t want to be a standup, I should focus on unscripted which is leaning into my strengths.”

Apart from that, Rahma is fuzzy on the details but says it makes sense in his head.

“This plan is pretty nebulous – more of a vibe. I’ll tell you one: I want to be at the Emmys. Hopefully for something I’ve made but if it’s a plus-one that’s fine. But I often say to famous people, ‘I’ll see you at the Emmys,’ as just like a bit. Now I kind of want it to be true.”