MCP Servers Explained in 5 Minutes (for beginners)
Other Videos📅 2025-04-06
Transcript
[00:00] let me explain as simple as possible what the heck an mCP server is and if we should even care welcome back y'all in today's video I'm going to go over what an mCP server is I'm going to draw it on the Whiteboard and make it as simple as possible as I've seen a lot of videos on this topic and they're just using a bunch of developer jargon that's just not necessary so I'm going to explain this in just like regular English so we can understand the use case of mCP server but I'm going to be quite honest with yall I'm not sure why there is so much hype around this after explaining this to y'all some of yall are going be like what are you talking about like I
[00:30] love this this deserves the hype but I think like 90 to 80% of y'all are going to be like okay this is what I thought it was why the heck is every influencer LinkedIn YouTube why is everyone just going crazy over this I don't get it let me explain it also new hat new hat alert here's a situation all I want you to think about when it comes to an mCP server is this is a layer and what this layer allows us to do is access either data in a database or alternatively AP I that are provided
[01:01] by external applications I'll make it sound simpler idea being this so we have our llm let's just call it Chad gbt or Claude for example what you've probably seen in your feed you can do with Claude desktop but the idea is that using something like CLA desktop let's just call it AI we can now access an mCP server hosted by a specific software application what's an example of this I think probably the best example that is probably hitting everyone's feed right now is zapier right the idea is that you
[01:33] can set up a mCP server of zapier and what this allows us to do is access all these different applications in our llm so such as Google Sheets Gmail the idea being this right we have our llm claw desktop zapier mCP server and then from here we can be like okay since we're accessing our mCP server which is zapier in this context we can access Gmail and with Gmail that's really small with Gmail which is like that block right there we can then not go through all the
[02:04] difficultness of setting up API custom en code like we don't care I don't want to do that we can now conversate talk to Chad gbt desktop over here ask it to do a specific action of sending an email and then the mCP server is that layer in the middle that allows it to actually do that action I'm talking to Claude send an email about pineapples and then with that information Claude right here is going to be able to communicate with this mCP server which is zapier which then will send out that email here we can also use this and leverage this in a
[02:35] way of essentially instead of maybe doing an action like a send an email we can access a external database as well so instead of the process and pipeline ending at the email being sent here we can maybe you know go to a database grab information from said database through this little mCP layer here and retrieve it back to our llm this is Bare Bones this is me explaining it in just regular English rather than going crazy crazy on you cuz honestly what you just saw right there probably answered half your questions of just like okay what's the
[03:06] big deal then we've been able to do this cuz we have been able to do this now I have tutorial videos showing you how to set this up with zapier and also another coming out showing you how to set this up with data button which is like your own custom API so rather it being from like a you know Standalone we know Gmail everyone loves Gmail maybe you built your own soft where you can access your own API internally in a chat like conversation claw desktop what's kind of weird here and I'm assuming other people talked about it maybe they haven't but we've been able to do this for quite a while now this just shows you the power
[03:36] of marketing now what I'm about to show you we've been able to do for the probably the last year maybe two years honestly at this point if you're not familiar with gbts uh they're essentially lasered in versions of Chad gbt we can do a bunch of cool stuff here we could always do the ability of custom actions that right there we've been able to do for the last one to two years now there's a very specific action I'm referring to that would have allowed us to create this kind of mCP server like context which was zap your AI actions gbts accessing zap your server to do a
[04:09] specific action to then retrieve data from rgbt this we could always do this now obviously with an mCP server there's a little bit more depth involved here when it comes to how complex you can get but the Baseline of our ability to access external data sources API databases we've always been able to do for the last two years for some reason mCP server is something new not really I'm not making this to bash on mCP servers I'm making this because I'm trying to give yall Clarity because man
[04:39] I've been seeing my feet people just wilding out people just saying that this is brand new oh my gosh like look what you can do in AI now we could always have done that now some of y'all are going to try to get really technical in the comments well Corbin this this this and this end of the day one of the major value points that's being shown here is our ability to access external apis in an llm whether that cursor claw desktop wind surf whatever it may be that Value Point and that capability was already possible it's been possible beyond that I see mCP servers it probably has its
[05:11] value in a very very specific circumstance and Niche I think for most of us this is kind of just like let's just have some fun this is kind of cool let's proceed so without further Ado I'll see you in the next video and c p a b c a b c d e f to videos that's one face I'll see you in the next video