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 (see Clavicular), 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.
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, which boasts headliners like Osamason and Lancey Foux, Lucki and Nettspend. “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. On Speed’s streams, hordes of screaming fans, “stream snipers” tracking his whereabouts in real time, and locals who have no idea what’s going on can suddenly find themselves in the middle of one of the internet’s most popular primetime shows.
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. At other stops, they sought out local figures who carried their own kind of small-town fame.
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.”
Like all content creators in 2026, Andrijasevic and Al-Emad know fan-created clips help spread their videos across social media. A stray moment could reach people who had never watched them before. Earlier this year, one of their clips caught the attention of PlaqueBoyMax, a streamer and musician known for making songs live with guests. He invited them onto his stream the next day. “He didn’t even really know who we were, it seemed like,” Al-Emad says. “It was just sort of ‘clips recognized clips.’”
They eventually joined Max on stream and recorded a vocal drop he could use as a producer tag, the audio signature that identifies a beat or producer. “I’m going to be honest, bro. Like, we on the internet, everyone’s so judgmental. We just got to stand out and be ourselves,” Max told them during the stream. Around the same time, people were picking apart whether Max himself was masculine enough, calling him “zesty” and criticizing his tattoo of the word “diva.” Andrijasevic texted him to ignore it. “Being that invested in someone else’s business is crazy,” he says. “I get ‘zesty’ allegations a lot, but it is what it is.”
By our second call, the trek had cured them of a few assumptions about streaming. Al-Emad says it takes “a certain type of person” to stay on for so long while also thinking about “short-form, clippable moments all the time.” They gave it their best shot, he says, but “there’s just some people who are bred for this and that’s not us.”
Andrijasevic went into the tour thinking they’d be naturally good at IRL streaming. As the trip went on, he says, they stopped trying to squeeze a video out of every stop. They became more interested in “authentically experiencing everything.” “It’s just so much harder than we expected,” he says. Their usual videos draw on spontaneous moments but have the benefit of editing, allowing them to shape the way diversions can play into the bit.
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.”
If Slushy Noobz goes live again, it’ll probably look more like an event than a road diary. Al-Emad is drawn to one-off broadcasts that let them bring in musicians or other guests. He wants viewers to feel they have to be there. Constant streaming, he says, belongs to “a different beast.” Andrijasevic agrees. The tour is also being shaped into a documentary, but at the time of our second call, details hadn’t been announced yet. “Real Gs move in silence like lasagna,” Andrijasevic says. By the time they get home, Al-Emad doesn’t want to make merch or launch another stream for the moment. He wants to get back to making “really good YouTube videos.” Andrijasevic compares it to coming home from a long trip and suddenly wanting to declutter the house and start working out. “We feel re-energized in a new way,” he says.
Nick Wilde from Zootopia greets fans during the Magic Kingdom parade. Kenslie McGuire
