Kareem Rahma
I couldn’t escape Kareem Rahma. He was on my Twitter feed when he waged a war against his fellow apartment building tenants after his New York magazine was stolen. He found his way onto my Instagram feed when his satiric video about going 387 days without reading was posted to a meme account I follow. And when I stowed my phone away and out of sight to graduate college, he was the commencement speaker for the University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts (his alma mater). Completely and utterly inescapable.
This is the nature of Rahma, a Minnesotan and now New Yorker of 11 years.
You could call him a comedian, a writer, a producer, or a poet. All those titles apply. But he’s also so much more. He recently starred in a Broad City-like short film produced by Nicholas Heller (more commonly known as New York Nico), Out of Order, that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. He’s done dozens of standup comedy shows, though he told me he doesn’t consider himself a standup comedian. He has a podcast. He’s written songs that one can only describe as Lonely Island-esque. And he’s gone viral. On every platform imaginable. Many times over. These days, though, going viral another time is the last thing on his laundry list of priorities.
“I have no interest in going viral if there's no payoff—I'm not talking about financial payoff," he says over a feta and spinach omelet and coffee with almond milk at a Brooklyn diner. “For me, it's more about getting my ideas seen and produced and developed versus having a bunch of people go ‘Lol this is awesome.’ At the end of the day, I want people to understand me or understand themselves more through what I make.”
Whatever qualities a creator needs to tug at the heartstrings of the internet or to get strangers to pay attention to their digital machinations, this multi-hyphenate media personality has them.
You can see this most clearly through his web series on Instagram and TikTok. On Subway Takes, he asks New Yorkers on the train to drop their hottest opinions. Keep the Meter Running has Rahma hailing a yellow cab on a bustling New York City street, asking the driver to take him and his crew anywhere in the city, and to literally keep the meter running, paying for their time as they tag along. Rahma came up with the idea a couple years ago, after he opened up to a taxi driver taking him from Manhattan to Brooklyn about some problems he was facing late that night.
Rahma recalls the driver’s kindness and wisdom—he tells me the driver gave him just the kind of advice you’d want to hear in times of distress. So when Rahma got dropped off, he asked if they could keep hanging out. Bluntly, the taxi driver responded: “Yeah, but I’m gonna have to keep the meter on.”
Among other places Rahma explores through his series, the taxi drivers have taken him to a casino in Queens, a West African restaurant in the Bronx, and an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. The series is an unequivocal success, with its top videos garnering millions of views.
His Roots
The Rahmas immigrated from Cairo, Egypt to Minnesota, when Kareem was 3 years old. It wasn’t easy—with Arabic as his primary language, Kareem went to school not knowing any English, for which his classmates chastised him. “I had no friends. I got bullied because I didn’t speak English. I got beat up on the bus. I got kicked out of preschool because I cried too much. And then eventually, I don't know what happened, I became cool. Probably because I spoke English at that point,” he said.
The oldest of three, he recalls a childhood in his Mendota Heights cul de sac surrounded by children who would ride their bikes and play baseball and basketball with one another. “It was kind of like The Sandlot […] it was a great life growing up,” Rahma said.
His mom ran a daycare in Kareem’s house and his dad took up odd jobs that, according to Kareem, would last a couple of months then fizzle out. “He was an entrepreneur,” he tells me. Rahma’s father, when he moved to America for the first time in 1969, drove cabs for his first five years in the country.
Rahma remembers accompanying his late father to a couple of his jobs. “It was constantly a new hustle, a new idea, a new thing to do and explore,” he said. One of those included the transportation of human organs from Twin Cities hospitals to neighboring cities. At the age of 11, Kareem was riding to Fargo with his father in a snowstorm to transport an organ to a hospital. “So I go drop off a heart and then drive back,” he says nonchalantly, as if he was dropping off dry cleaning.
At the University of Minnesota, he pursued a major in journalism and worked at the Minnesota Daily selling digital and newspaper ads. He lived in Como and subsisted on bowls of ground beef with barbecue sauce. He joined a frat, got kicked out of the frat for not coming to meetings, graduated, and landed a job at Risdall Marketing Group, before a stint at the now-shuttered McNally Smith College of Music as its online marketing manager, and then as a teacher for a class about the internet.
One lunch break, while Rahma was working out at his local Lifetime Fitness, he overheard a guy complaining to his friend in the locker room that his boss wouldn’t let him go on vacation with his family. Rahma remembers thinking to himself: “If that's how the real world is, I'm not participating.” With that in mind, he moved to New York in his mid-twenties to accomplish two things: to get rich and to never work for anyone else again. Since then, he says, “one of those things has happened.”
Before carving out his own path, he started at Vice working in the global marketing division and then moved to the New York Times to develop its digital audience and growth strategy on video. Through that time, he witnessed the evolution of digital media and was tuned into the inner workings of online culture.
Rahma tells me he has never been interested in technology, offering up the example that he doesn’t have any smart lights in his home. “But I do love the internet. That's my favorite thing. That’s my hobby.” If it’s a hobby, Rahma has mastered it.
Crazy Strategy Brain
Last February, Rahma’s New York magazine was stolen from his apartment. He saw it on his way out of his apartment in the mail pile and didn’t see it once he returned. So he put up a sign. Then the sign went viral. What else is a guy to do in a situation like that but to keep the momentum going, build the world out, give them more? An alleged neighbor wrote on Rahma’s sign that they would give the magazine back if he stopped playing his music so loud. That went viral. Then other tenants got involved, and so did the landlord. New York even reached out to write an article on the debacle. “I'll reveal for the first time ever that that whole thing,” outside of the stolen magazine, which was indeed stolen, he says, “was completely scripted,” he tells me. “I don’t know if [New York Magazine] was in on my joke or not,” he said. I’m speechless. “It's entertaining. It's fun. Why not? I mean, half the shit you see on the internet is fake anyways,” he says.
Eventually, Rahma wants to produce TV shows and films. But creating such a large scale enterprise can take years and out-of-reach resources. In the meantime, Anthony Di Mieri, one of two directors on Meter, says that Rahma has “cracked the mold of TikTok” with his “crazy strategy brain.” “He knows the internet better than anybody, he’s like an internet savant,” Di Mieri tells me.
On Subway Takes, another show Rahma produces with the help of directors Di Mieri and Willem Holzer, he sits on the subway with a guest and they have a 60-second-or-less conversation about a hot take of theirs. (Reading books on the subway is performative, wearing flip flops in the city is disgusting, etc.) Most takes are ironic, some of them are sincere. The show is akin to a quick, digestible podcast sans the production of a podcast. “People are sitting on the internet arguing about the dumbest things in the world in the comments. So why not just give them a proper forum?” he said.
“He knows the stuff we’re building is gonna be successful. He breathes that in and it happens. I mean, there's plenty of losses in there, but it's the momentum of the strategy that really turns stuff out,” Holzer said.
The Grand Experiment
While the Great New York Magazine debacle of 2022 was fake, Rahma presses that Meter is completely and totally real. It’s a wholesome show, spotlighting native New Yorkers and immigrants who came to the city to pursue their own form of the American Dream. In a recent episode, Rahma accompanies taxi driver Balde Mohamed as he has Iftar in the Masjid for Ramadan. We see Rahma meeting his family, eating Iftar and praying with them. We hear a conversation where Balde Mohamed opens up about the loss of his own father. These are real New Yorker’s stories, the sort that a TikToker accosting NYU students with a microphone in Washington Square Park is less likely to come across.
“[The cab driver’s stories] are relatable stories for everybody. It's a working class-type job, and those hopes and aspirations that those drivers have are very reflective in the audience, because I think we all have the same in some version,” Holzer said.
Will Rahma ever come back to Minnesota and be driven around by Twin Cities Uber drivers asking them to take him to their favorite places? He has considered the tri coastal lifestyle—staying in New York in the spring and fall, Minnesota in the summer, and LA in the winter. For now, it’s New York or nowhere. But who knows where Rahma will be next year, or in five, or ten. “Everything is a grand experiment,” he tells me.
