Slushy Noobz fans inhabit something of an inner sanctum, fluent in the Toronto-based YouTube channel’s running jokes and lore. The channel, launched in 2023 by Hamzah Al-Emad, 24, and Martin Andrijasevic, 27, grew out of the pair’s friendship and a shared love of old-school gaming videos, and features everything from Minecraft role-play to restaurant reviews, road trips, and increasingly elaborate real-world challenges. On a Zoom call from a hostel room, midway through a cross-Canada livestream tour, Andrijasevic puts it more simply: “Finding entertainment in the mundane, that’s all we do.”
As members of a generation raised on YouTube, Slushy Noobz feels quietly subversive. While online entertainment aimed at young men increasingly rewards nihilism, cruelty, and humiliation, Al-Emad and Andrijasevic are refreshingly normal: two friends hanging out and paying close enough attention for the banal to become strange. Before Slushy Noobz, both made short-form videos on their own. They talked through DMs, became online friends, and eventually met in person. Andrijasevic was living in Ottawa; he later moved to Toronto so they could make videos more regularly. Their early videos revived the spirit of 2010s-era YouTube: two grown men playing video games and treating a newly adopted dog like the center of an elaborate mythology. Other days, they wandered Toronto with an iPhone or simply turned on the camera while they were already hanging out. The channel now has more than 1.5 million YouTube subscribers.
The Rise of Authentic IRL Streaming
Their growing popularity has also produced an increasingly strange collection of celebrity crossovers. Al-Emad and Andrijasevic have gone live with NLE Choppa, while Andrijasevic appeared alongside the rapper in a Marc Jacobs campaign and, more recently, popped up in a Lil Uzi Vert music video. This summer, they partnered with Toronto underground music festival First Class Fest. “We’ve just brushed up so many times with this underground sound,” Andrijasevic says. “We’re friends with a couple of producers here and friends with some artists. I think we just fall naturally in this place.”
Earlier this summer, inspired by the globetrotting extravagance of 21-year-old streamer IShowSpeed’s marathon travel streams, the Slushy Noobz boys tried to take their friendship live across Canada. Along with their production crew, who went ahead to test internet connections, meet locals, and scout each stop, Al-Emad and Andrijasevic were less concerned with manufacturing confrontations than letting local people show them around. They beaded with Indigenous elders and went fishing in Newfoundland with someone for whom catching and cooking fish was simply daily life.
Navigating the Future of Content
They thought about tone from the start. As it currently exists, IRL streaming is often fueled by the desire to see drama play out live on camera. Strangers can become props, and public spaces can turn into film sets no one agreed to take part in. During our first conversation, Andrijasevic says the genre had “a harassment air to it.”
The word “wholesome” follows them around, and the tour brought it up again. Andrijasevic doesn’t mind being seen as an alternative to the harder, alpha-male side of streamer culture. He says he’d welcome audiences looking for a change “with open arms.” Meanwhile, Al-Emad bristles at the idea of being typecast as “safe.” He isn’t interested in promising a sanitized stream where nothing strange or messy happens. He just doesn’t think someone has to be humiliated to make a moment count. Andrijasevic’s definition? Two friends “experiencing the world.” “That’s all,” he says. “There’s nothing else really there.”