On GameSpot After Dark episode 12, Jake, Kallie, Lucy, and Jean-Luc are joined by Mat Paget, GameSpot’s official Canadian, and talk about Modern Warfare, The Outer Worlds, Parasite, their favorite Pokemon regions and starters, and also Fallout 1st.
But we all know what the most important topic of discussion was: Lightning McQueen. Prompted by a listener email, the group try and figure out what kind of health insurance the sentient race car needs. As you can imagine, the conversation goes places.
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Ka-Chow
Jake: “Hi, all. Does Lightning McQueen have to buy car insurance or life insurance? Thanks, Sam.”
Lucy: This is my favorite email of all time.
Kallie: Ka-chow.
Jake: He tweeted at me and was like, “I just sent an email, sorry if it’s a little weird. You guys don’t have to read it.” I was like no. This is [good].
Lucy: No, we’re reading it. I love this email.
Mat: I’m going to make this real easy for everybody. In the world of cars: there is no health insurance; there’s no car insurance. It’s all free. All the cars are taken care of, medicare for all.
Lucy: It’s the NHS.
Jean-Luc: Do they feel pain when they get wrecked?
Kallie: I really like the socialist utopia version of Disney’s Cars. That reading of cars, yeah.
Jean-Luc: I’ve only seen the first Cars, and I haven’t seen a very long time, but…
Lucy: Yeah, I haven’t seen Cars in years.
Kallie: I’ve never seen Cars, but I did recently go to Disneyland and I went to Cars land.
Lucy: Oh yeah, I went to that a couple of years ago. Lightning McQueen was there.
Jake: But you don’t need to see multiple Cars movies to understand this question, right? Does a living car need life insurance or car insurance?
Kallie: I think life insurance. I think life.
Jake: This is an ethical question here.
Kallie: I think life because … no actually, well…
Jean-Luc: Because if it’s car insurance than what qualifies as life insurance.
Lucy: Is this like the Disney thing of how Mickey and Minnie are mice and Donald’s a duck and Goofy’s a dog and then for some reason Pluto was an actual dog to the dog. Where does it end Disney? WHERE DOES IT END?
Kallie: Hello Kitty does the same thing. Hello Kitty is a cat, but she has a pet cat. Well, Hello Kitty isn’t a cat. She’s supposed to not be a cat, but she has a pet cat. Anyway, I think they need both. I think they need car insurance for the kinds of accidents we cover. Like that’s what car insurance covers for us, right? Then, I think they need life insurance for if they get totaled.
Mat: I’m going to disagree with you. So the thing is in the Cars universe they have life insurance for the cars because they are the living things in that world.
Jake: You keep saying in the Cars universe. But do you have proof?
Mat: Yes. I wrote a book about it. I did extensive research. The life insurance is for the living cars cause they are living, and then instead of car insurance, they have human insurance because they get on the humans, and ride them to work every day like we get into cars.
Jean-Luc: No. Humans do not exist in the universe.
Mat: They exist. They absolutely do. They exist. They have human insurance and life insurance, end of question.
Jean-Luc: Okay. I think it’s the same thing. Like their version of life insurance is just called car insurance because they’re cars. So, they would call it car insurance but it’s just life insurance. They don’t have…
Kallie: But, does it cover accidents?
Jean-Luc: Yeah, because like they wouldn’t need to separate the two because there’s no reason to have them separate.
Kallie: What if they have no insurance?
Jean-Luc: Oh shit, well that’s a whole different thing. Worker’s Rights.
Lucy: I Googled this, okay. This is incredible. So someone on Quora has asked this very question. Craig Anderson, chartered insurance professional has answered. “I would suggest that Mr. McQueen and his cohorts would likely be better off with life and health insurance. Automobile insurance policies are written to indemnify the owner of a vehicle for loss or damage to the vehicle or legal liability.” This is insane. “As I recall, the vehicles in the Car story universe are free beings, not slaves. Thus they have no owner. Subsequently, there would be no insured person under any automobile policy they took out without knowing it to be indemnified for any loss of damage to the quote on quote vehicle and no owner to be liable for the loss of damage resulting from the use or operation of the quote on quote vehicle. The policy would never pay and therefore be of absolutely no use.” I suppose Lightning could get around this problem by forming a legal entity brackets, Kachow holdings and then leasing himself.
Mat: Well, no offense, Craig. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
Kallie: Craig actually raises a great point. Craig mentioned health insurance and that’s what we’re ignoring. The question posits car insurance or life insurance, but in the car’s universe, car insurance would be health insurance. In our universe, health insurance and life insurance are distinct. So cars have to buy car insurance which is health insurance and life insurance but they don’t need life insurance because you’re not required to get health insurance. I mean life insurance, but you also aren’t required to get health insurance but you should be, but you’re required to get car insurance.
Lucy: There is a worrying amount of people who work in the financial services who have replied to this Quora.
Mat: I guarantee you that there is a joke in one of the Cars movies where there is a mafia car talking to another mafia car about taking out a different car and saying “be sure to take out a car insurance policy before we make the hit.”
Kallie: Why did you make him British, that was not a mafia accent.
Jake: What is a mafia accent?
Kallie: Like New Jersey.
Lucy: Like Donbot from Futurama.
Kallie: Yes like Donbot from Futurama thank you, Fat Tony, let’s go.
Mat: Be sure to take out a nice car insurance policy, on this mate.
Kallie: You got British. You start fine and then you go into British.