The Draft: A Physician Money Game
The Draft is a monthly game played by Ryan Inman and Jimmy Turner. Three physician lives are put on the table, each one a full career with its own family, setbacks, and luck. Both hosts draft from the same board of money moves, and every move on the board is priced in points. Each host gets 10 points to build one money plan, and that one plan has to survive all three lives.
Build the next life
Your career could be next month’s game.
The lives on this table come from listeners. Answer seventeen questions about a physician life: the specialty, the family, the debts, the turns, and how it ends. Submissions become the lives Ryan and Jimmy draft against in future games.
Build a characterHow the game works, A to Z
No scorecard, no rubric, no fine print. Here is the whole game, in the order it happens.
Meet the three lives
Every game starts with three physician lives, read out in full before anyone picks anything. Each life is a whole career: a specialty, a family, a house, debts, and the turns a real life takes, good and bad. The lives come from real specialty careers, and new ones are built from listener submissions.
See the board
Every draftable money move sits on one board, all 24 pieces, each priced in points. Big protection costs big points. Small habits cost one. One piece, the annual money date with your spouse, is free. The full board is listed below, and it never changes mid-game.
Ten points each
Ryan and Jimmy each get exactly 10 points. That is the whole budget. Ten points cannot buy the board, and that is the point: every plan leaves something uncovered, and the uncovered thing stays visible as that player's gap.
Draft live, pick by pick
The picks happen live on the show, one at a time, alternating until both budgets are spent. A piece is gone the moment someone takes it. There is only one of each piece, so taking the piece the other player needs is the game. Unspent points are lost.
Argue the three lives
After the draft, the hosts walk all three lives and argue whose plan survived them better, life by life. Points never decide the winner. The argument is about what each plan actually did when the disability, the lawsuit, the job loss, or the long slow squeeze arrived.
Ryan keeps the official score
Ryan tracks every pick, every point spent, and every point left, live as the draft happens. His board is the official record of the game.
You decide the winner
When the episode drops, a poll goes up on X and stays pinned for 72 hours. The audience votes on whose plan survived the three lives better. That poll is the official result, and it is the only thing that feeds the season leaderboard.
A new game every month
New lives, same board, same 10 points. One game a month, and the loser of the last game drafts first in the next one.
Every piece, and what it costs
This is the whole board, priced exactly as the hosts play it. Every piece sits on its own card: the move, its price, and what it does.
Game 1: the first three lives
The first game opens with an anesthesiologist, a hospitalist, and a family medicine doctor. Read the lives, then take the board and draft your own plan before you listen.
Maya, 34, anesthesiologist. The hands fade.
Married, her spouse home full time, two kids, employed by a hospital group the whole way. She is never sued and the job never wobbles. Then at 52 her hands can no longer do procedural work, and she goes part time for good in a nonprocedural role. Expert witness work pays well in the second act. She lives to 78, with her last five years in assisted living.
Daniel, 41, hospitalist. The verdict, and gone at 51.
Married, his spouse works part time, three kids, employed the whole way. His group gets sold to private equity, his pay drops 20 percent, and he is locked in for three years. A malpractice verdict lands a million dollars above his policy limits, and the difference comes out of his own assets. Two rental properties cash flow through it all. He dies at 51, with the kids still at home.
Priya, 34, family medicine. The slow squeeze.
On the Public Service Loan Forgiveness path. Married, her spouse works, and their child has major medical needs, about $40,000 a year, every year. Her parents need covered care at $3,000 a month for eight years. She buys a $1.8 million house at 45 that crowds out saving for six years, inherits $400,000 at 48, and burns out at 51, taking a year off unpaid before coming back part time. She lives to 86, mostly healthy. The money just never stretches, for twenty years.
Spend your 10.
Download the board, draft against the same three lives, and build the plan you would defend. Then post your card and tag @ryaninman and @TPP_MD so we can argue with it. No email, no signup, nothing to join. We want to see your 10.
Get the board and draft your 10The Draft, answered
What is The Draft?
How many points does each player get?
Who decides the winner?
How do I play along?
How do I submit a life for a future game?
The game covers three lives a month. Yours can be answered directly.
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