A podcast with Martin Kenny & Scott Schoen

THE HOLLOW LADDER

The economy keeps telling you you're climbing. The Hollow Ladder is where we check if the rungs are actually there — tariffs that look like wins, jobs that look like promotions, growth that looks real until you put weight on it.

The Hollow Ladder podcast cover art — a cracked glass ladder rising against a navy-to-amber gradient
RUNG 04
"Tariffs that look like wins but don't pay workers. Jobs that look like promotions but aren't. Growth numbers that look real — until you put weight on them."

Every episode, we take one story the economy is telling about itself and find the shell game underneath it.

RUNG 03  — missing

Episodes

New episodes weekly
01
The Producers Middle Income Trap
Tariffs create the appearance of a manufacturing comeback — the headlines, the ribbon-cuttings, the jobs numbers. What they don't create is a raise. We trace where the value actually goes.
42 MIN
02
Title Theater
Promotions without power, seniority without security. Why the corporate ladder still has rungs painted on where the wood used to be — and who benefits from you not noticing.
38 MIN
03
GDP Is Not a Person
A growth number can be true and still describe nobody's actual life. On the gap between aggregate statistics and the household balance sheet.
45 MIN
The newsletter

The Hollows

The stuff that didn't make the ladder. Short dispatches between episodes — the story we cut, the number we couldn't fit, the shell game we're saving for next week.

No spam. One dispatch at a time. Unsubscribe whenever.

Hosted by

Martin Kenny, host of The Hollow Ladder
Martin Kenny
Host & Co-writer

Entrepreneur and sales professional building a portfolio of Africa-focused ventures. Writes and thinks in the Austrian-economics, contrarian-macro tradition — allergic to any number that hasn't been asked "compared to what?"

Scott Schoen, host of The Hollow Ladder
Scott Schoen
Host & Co-writer

Co-author, alongside Martin Kenny, of the book this show is built from. Brings the discipline of showing his work — no claim survives the episode without the receipts behind it.