The work of Gromov, Lawson, Schoen, Yau on scalar curvature inspired progress in metric geometry. In turn, this progress inspired new results about geometry and topology of manifolds with positive scalar curvature. In my talk I will give some examples of how ideas travel between these two worlds. The talk will be based on joint works with Lishak-Nabutovsky-Rotman, Maximo, Chodosh-Li, Wang.