Why Subway Takes Feels So Easy — But Isn’t

Hey honeys and hustlers,

Every time an episode of Subway Takes pops up on my Instagram or Substack Notes feed, I immediately stop scrolling and watch. Kareem Rahma has built something I deeply admire: a short-form series that feels spontaneous, human, funny, and repeatable without feeling overly manufactured. It’s a rare internet format that’s both easy to understand and hard to pull off, which is exactly why it works. I went to Subway Takes Live at Brooklyn Improv in New York City thinking I’d be a delighted observer happily taking in a live production of an internet-based show so I could learn when my time comes. Instead, I ended up on stage.

Participation didn’t feel like being thrown onstage and told to “be funny.” It felt like being guided into a well-designed experience. After I bought my ticket (a quick “wait, NYC is only three hours away?” realization that immediately became a “request PTO and leave work early” decision), I got an email inviting attendees to submit a take that could be presented live. I sent one in mostly as a dare to myself. The morning of the show, a producer texted me letting me know my take had been chosen. cue internal squealing. A few hours before showtime, they called me, walked me through the run of show, and did a mock run-through of the whole moment—how I’d present, how I’d defend it, what the rhythm would feel like. The experience wasn’t “go perform”; it was “we built a container; come be a person inside it.”

Subway Takes is a short-form series format that has enough depth that it has now gone wide: a good format doesn’t reduce you to one moment on the internet. Subway Takes works because it’s not just about opinions. It’s about constraints: one person, one take, one subway ride. In the live version, you could feel those constraints doing the heavy lifting—making the ideas memorable, giving the audience a shared language, and letting the room relax into the premise. The format creates the vibe; the people fill it.

My take, for the record, was this: it’s okay to be performative sometimes. In the process of being performative, we often do a thing long enough to learn something real. We pick up a book we wouldn’t normally read. We show up to an underrepresented business when we’d rather stay home or get our usual. We try on a version of ourselves that feels slightly aspirational—and somewhere in the trying, we grow. If authenticity is the goal, performance can be a surprisingly useful route.

Being onstage was terrifying in the way only a very specific kind of public moment can be—short, bright, and impossible to hide from. But it also felt… weirdly safe. Video and photo camera crew were all over the venue, but I didn’t feel uneasy on stage. The producers and the panel of comedians made it easy. Not “easy” like effortless, but “easy” like structured. Like you could tell someone had thought about how a nervous stranger might move through this moment and still have a good time. Watching Kareem run the show made me think about why I’ve been tracking his work in the first place. He has an instinct for turning a simple premise into a recognizable internet format—and then, crucially, building an ecosystem around it. Subway Takes Live isn’t just a live event; it’s a bridge from short-form to long-form. It’s a proof of concept that a strong format can travel: from platform to platform, from screen to room, from scroll to ticket.

Simple does not mean easy. Behind the show is real craft—clear breaks, cinema cameras, pacing, intentional highlights for the comedians he brings onstage, and details that signal care. Kareem had notes for every person coming up, including where they were from (the person ahead of me came all the way from Brazil 🤯). That’s not accidental. That’s production. I found Kareem through his long-form production, season 1 of Keep the Meter Running, which led me to his series made for social platforms: Subway Takes (our phones are always listening).

I left the live show thinking about my own work—not in a jealous way, but in a studying-a-great-creator way. Kareem doesn’t seem preoccupied with “graduating” to TV or streaming. He’s building for YouTube and social, and he’s doing it with an ease that comes from knowing what the internet actually rewards: clarity, repeatability, and the feeling that you’re in on something. He previously worked in narrative podcasting with his co-founder, the one who is executive producing Figma’s new YouTube series, and that has informed many of his opinions about the line between production value and distribution value.

Subway Takes Live is also a reminder that going deep and going wide isn’t an either/or. You can take a short-form idea and extend it into a long-form universe. You can collaborate your way into scale and long form. You can turn a series into an event, an event into a video, and a video into multiple distribution moments from the audience that was already invested enough to buy a ticket (though he still hasn’t posted the long-form video or any photos from the event. Trust me, I’ve checked religiously).

Most of all, I left with a conviction I keep relearning: a clear premise does half the work. Constraints make ideas memorable. And the formats that look the easiest are often the ones that took the most discipline to design. Which is exactly why I loved being there.

Sooooo what’s your take? Share it with me in the comments or reply to this email!