Kevin Scott: Microsoft CTO

Lex opens by introducing Kevin Scott, the chief technology officer of Microsoft, who previously served as senior vice president of engineering and operations at LinkedIn and, before that, oversaw mobile ads engineering at Google. Scott also hosts a podcast of his own, "Behind the Tech," which Lex says he is a fan of.

Lex frames the talk as a wide-ranging conversation covering many facets of computing, recorded over a month earlier—before Microsoft announced its investment in OpenAI, a move Lex notes a few listeners had already asked him about and expects to revisit in future conversations.

After the usual appeal to subscribe and support the show, Lex offers a personal thank-you to Patreon supporters and turns to the conversation itself.

Lex notes Scott once described himself as a kid in a candy store at Microsoft and asks for a whirlwind tour of everything the company works on. Scott runs through the portfolio: a large cloud and SaaS business, the original productivity software everyone uses, an operating-system business, and a hardware line spanning computer mice and headphones up to high-end PCs and laptops.

Scott describes a wide-ranging research group that reaches from economics to human-computer interaction to artificial intelligence, singling out economist Glen Weyl's work on "radical markets," and rounds out the list with GitHub, LinkedIn, and a search-advertising and news business.

Prompted on gaming, Scott lights up about Xbox and a morning spent geeking out with Tim Schafer over the old LucasArts game Day of the Tentacle, reflecting on how, as CTO, the serious work is occasionally punctuated by the sheer delight of the people he gets to talk with.

Lex asks what radical markets and the economics research are really about. Scott explains the core question—whether capitalism and free markets, with their built-in incentive structures, can produce equitably distributed benefits—and contrasts a socialist, central-planning response with Weyl's instinct to lean further into market-based mechanisms.