It’s the last podcast of the year! We’ll miss you guys very much… until CES is over, then we’ll have plenty to talk about. And really, there isn’t much exciting news during this dead week leading up to the holidays and the madness in Las Vegas. So we keep it short. Discussion centers around the realities of YouTube stars’ lives, reality TV stars, and virtual reality. Also, the hosts offer their predictions for the CES mayhem.

Send the hosts feedback on their personal Twitter feeds (David Pierce is @pierce, Molly McHugh is @iammollymchugh and Michael Calore is @snackfight) or bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab.

Joe Brown joins Michael and David this week (Molly is out snorkeling in the alps). At the top of the show, there’s a lively discussion about hoverboards, why they’re terrible, and why they aren’t going away. Then Joe gets called away on boss-related business, so Michael and David discuss streaming sports, what an Apple-run streaming content service would look like, the Google Pixel C, and the OMG WTF iPhone battery case that we all guffawed/vomited over this week.

Send the hosts feedback on their personal Twitter feeds (David Pierce is @pierce, Molly McHugh is @iammollymchugh and Michael Calore is @snackfight) or bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab.

It’s finally December, which means it’s time to buy wonderful gadgets for your loved ones (or yourself). That’s the central theme of this episode, but the talk eventually centers around music streaming services: the death of Rdio, the rising hopes of Amazon Prime Music, the dominance of Spotify, and whether YouTube Red has any chance of making a big dent.