Model Context Protocol (MCP), clearly explained (why it matters)

everyone is talking about mcps it's gone completely viral but the reality is most people have no idea what mcps are and what they mean and what are the startup opportunities associated with it so in this episode I brought Professor Ross Mike who is probably the the best explainer of technical Concepts in a really easy way that someone who's non-technical can really understand I brought him on he explains it beautifully in such a short amount of time and if you stick to the end you'll hear a couple of his startup ideas that incorporate mcps so um

enjoy the episode and see you [Music] soon all right well we got Professor Ross Mike on the Pod um and the reason why we have him is because I don't know what the hell mcps are and I've been seeing it on X and I need a succinct clear Professor Ross Mike explanation um yes I've read a bunch of threads on it and I've seen a couple videos on it but there's nothing like a Ross mic explanation so I'm here for the what do I need to know about mcps and that's that's what that's why you're

here thank you for coming on I I I appreciate that thank you very much yeah class is definitely in session I'll just start um sharing my screen okay so understanding mCP um is really um important uh but you'll also realize the benefits and why it's sort of a big deal but not really at the same time you see one of the things in programming land that we have and that programmers love are standards and the reason why standards are important is they allow for us Engineers to build systems that communicate with each other the most

popular one that you know you might have heard of or you might not and you don't really need to know the details is rest rest apis and they're basically a standard that every company follows when they construct their apis when they construct their services for me as an engineer to be able to connect with them now understanding that engineering is all about standards and having these formalities we follow to make life easier when we think of in the context of an llm I want you to understand this one important thing llms by themselves are incapable

of doing anything meaningful what do I mean by that if you remember the first you know chat gbt 3 or was it 3.5 I'm not sure but if you just open any chat bot and you tell it to send you an email um it won't know how to do that it will just tell you hey I can't send you an email the most you can do with an llm is ask it questions uh maybe ask it to tell you about some historical figure whatever it may be right um llms are truly incapable of doing anything

uh meaningful and what I mean by meaningful it'd be nice if you know it could send me an email um if it could um do some specific task on my behalf but the only thing an llm in its current state is good at is predicting the next text right so for example if I say My Big Fat Greek and llm with all the data source with all its training material will determine that the next word is wedding right so this is the most an llm by itself that it could do right the next Evolution was

developers figured out how to take llms and combine them with tools and you can think of a tool like an API for example um most of us are aware where chat gbt and these other chat Bots are able to search the internet for example perplexity right perplexity gives you the option to chat with an llm but that llm has the ability to fetch um information from the internet and present that to you the llm itself is not capable of doing that but what they've done is they've constructed a tool they've given the llm access to

an external service right and there's plenty of these Services right I think there's Brave search um chat open AI offers an API now so llms have started to become a bit more powerful when we connected tools to them right I can give you an example let's say um let's say every time I get an email I want there to be an entry in a spreadsheet now most of you know there are services like zapier end8 or you know any of those Automation Services if I build out an autom and connect that to my llm it

just became a bit more meaningful now that's awesome and cool but it gets really frustrating when you want to build an assistant that does multiple things imagine search the internet um read your emails summarize this you start to become someone who glues a bunch of different tools to these llms and it can get very frustrating very cumbersome if you're wondering why we don't have have an Iron Man level Jarvis assistant is because combining these tools making it work with the llm is one thing but then stacking these tools on top of each other making it

cohesive making it work together is a nightmare itself and this is where we're currently at and does before I continue does this make sense this is where we started llms by themselves write me a poem um you know tell me about World War I um and then the second evolution is oh we now have tools right we now have um these things these external services that we can connect to our llm the problem here is they're difficult it's annoying and as someone who works at an AI startup Tempo and we have a lot of tools

like for example we do a search um you have to find an external service you have to connect it to the llm and you have to make sure the llm doesn't hallucinate or do something stupid and believe it or not as cool as llms are by themselves they're very very dumb um but these tools make them just a bit more capable so this is where we're at uh Greg we good so far crystal clear I'm loving this beautiful quick break in the Pod to tell you a little bit about startup Empire so startup Empire is

my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me like you who want to build out their startup ideas now they're looking for content to help accelerate that they're looking for potential co-founders they're looking for uh tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them how do you do email marketing how do you build an audience how do you go viral on Twitter all these different things that's exactly what startup Empire is and it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas or it's for people who have

a startup but just they're not seeing the traction uh that they need so you can check out the link to Startup empire.co in the description now enters mCP and what does mCP mean I think the simplest way right without getting too technicals I've read the threads too and as a technical person I appreciate it but for the non- Tey I can assume it's frustrating think of it this way think of every tool that I have to connect to to make my llm valuable um as a different language so tool one's English tool two is Spanish

tool three is Japanese right and imagine every tool it's its own language and it's not that there isn't a standard for how apis work but every service provider constructs their apis differently there's different information you have to pass there's just various degree of of of of things that you have to set up that again it just feels like gluing a bunch of different things together will it work yes but at scale it gets very diff difficult mCP you can consider it to be a layer between your llm and the services and the tools and this

layer translates all those different languages into a unified language that makes complete sense to the llm right so it's the evolution of llm plus tools but in this Evolution it just makes it makes it very simple for the llm to connect and to access different outside resources right because that's what tools are at the end of the day so with mCP I'm able to connect to an outside data source an outside database maybe um a tool like uh convex or superbase right um imagine I I just tell the llm you know what create me a

new entry in my database and it it's connected to my database via mCP and it knows exactly what to do and how to do in the second evolution llms and tools there's a lot of manual work that goes on there's a lot of stepbystep planning that you have to do and there's a lot of edge cases where it can fail and this is why again none of us as exciting as the space is none of us have a Jarvis level assistant yet it feels like we're there and we're close but this system makes it so

that it's very diff and what's frustrating is this imagine let me think of a simple service a simple like you know tool imagine um every time a slack message comes your llm reads that slack message and it shoots you a text right sounds pretty trivial here's the frustrating part imagine slack updates their API or the text service updates makes a change and let's say that service is connected to other services or you have some sort of like automation step-by-step thing that you've planned it becomes a nightmare it becomes terrifying and this is why even in

the age of llms good Engineers will still get paid because stuff like this like this exists but what mCP does it unifies the llm and the service right it creates this this uh layer where the service and the llm can communicate efficiently now let's get into some practicality you can think of the mCP ecosystem as follows you have an mCP client you have the protocol you have an mCP server and you have a service right an mCP client is something like Tempo wind surf cursor and they are basically the client facing side the llm facing

side of this ecosystem the protocol again is that two-way connection between the client and the server and the server is what translate translates that external service its capabilities and what it can do to the client and that's why between the mCP client and the mCP server there's the mCP protocol but here's the fascinating part and this is why I think anthropic they're playing 3D chess when they built this is the way this is architected the mCP server is now in the hands of the service provider so if let's say me and Greg run a Dev

Tool company right where maybe we're doing a database right like we're like listen we're going to build the best database company in the world and we want people's llms to have access to this database it is now on us to construct this mCP server so that the client can fully access this so anthropic in a way sort of said listen we want our llms to be more powerful more capable uh but it's your job to figure this out and this is why you've noticed all the external service providers are now building different mCP servers they're

building out repos and all this stuff right so this is a big deal in a sense where llms are going to be more capable but from a technological perspective all they did was create a standard a standard that it seems like all companies and all Engineers are going to upon because you can construct any system any API however you please the problem is if you want to scale you want to grow you want other developers other businesses to connect and work with your service it has to be in a fashion that makes sense for them

imagine if all of us just spoke different languages but standards allow us to communicate in a way that makes sense to all of us and mCP is that for llms because llms by themselves are not that capable they're just they're they're they're they're systems that have great predictability and they know how to predict the next word but when you can when you add this mCP protocol as a whole you now have a way for it to be capable of doing important stuff now understanding all this it's not all sunshine and rainbows there are some technical

challenges if you notice if anyone has set up an mCP um server on any of their favorite mCP clients it's annoying um there's a lot of downloading you have to move this file you have to copy this that and the third um and it's a lot of local stuff there are some Kinks that have to be figured out uh but once this is figured out or finalized polished or maybe they update the standard or maybe someone comes up with a better one we start to enter a world where llms start to become more capable and

that is literally all what mCP is just making llms more capable we're trying we're doing that with tools right now it's kind of working um but mCP seems to be the next Evolution I think Greg I saw your latest video um Manis Manis is a great example of number two they have tons of tools and kudos to them they've engineer engineered it well in a way where you know they well they work well cohesively I didn't get to try it out so I'm just looking at what people have done but I can tell you this

it's a lot lot of engineering hours it's a lot of one change happens something broke someone's on call and not sleeping but with mCP um it's structured in a way where um if we all follow this um standard um the llm will have access to everything it needs um and we will all be happy users so in short that is literally all what mCP is it's not um Einstein's fifth law of physics or anything crazy like that it's literally standard for llms and it's exciting it's something to be excited about um and yeah I hope

I hope that clarified I just kept ramling so I apologize for that gr no no this is this is exactly what I wanted I want to end on one question for you so this is now clear to me crystal clear to me what mcps are but my question is well before I even ask my question every time there's been a popularized protocol for example https or uh SMTP um examples like that there's been a lot of big businesses that were created on top of it and there's been basically this like why now you know why

this just opening of opportunities yeah the average person listening to this podcast is building out their ideas is this does this matter or you at all for that person like yeah I think that's a great question I think if I were so I'll speak to the technical and the non- technical to the technical there's a lot of things that a technical person can do here I I just don't have time Greg but one thing I was thinking of was like an mCP App Store and I'll just give this idea out for free because this this

podcast is all about ideas basically there's a lot of these repos out there um of mCP servers and it'd be cool if someone can go on a site I even bought the domain um it does nothing but again please anybody like steal this idea um um I bought the domain and it'd be cool if someone could um go on U like look at the different mCP servers there they they see the GitHub code and whatever and they can click like install or deploy and they that server is deployed and gives them a specific URL and

then they can paste that in an mCP client and work that out so for the technical person if you make millions all I ask is just you know send me ,000 but for the non-technical person what I would really focus on is I would just stay up to date with the platforms that are building out mCP capability and just see where the standards are going right because like you said um when these standards are finalized I don't know if mCP has fully won I think it needs to be challenged um or I don't know if

anthropic is going to make an update we don't know it's very early but I would say keep very close attention to what the final standard is going to be because once that standard is finalized and all these service providers start to like you know build out their mCP or whatever thing it is you can now start to integrate much seamlessly and much easier right this is why again every week There's a new chatbot interface with new tools and it wins because this part step number two is not easy right especially making it cohesive and making

it work fast right like I can sit in two hours and build something like this but building out that user experience making it Flawless limiting the hallucinations it's very very hard I mean this is a lot of the work we do at Tempo but this makes it so that integrating is a lot easier and you can think of these as like Lego pieces that you can continue to stack to stack so for my smart and wise business owners startup uh ideas podcast enjoyers I would really just keep a close attention right I think even for

myself I don't think with this mCP stuff we're at a place where any shots can be fired that make um any smart business decision but this is one of those things where you just you sit and you watch and you're just observing and learning and when the right thing at the right time happens you strike so I don't see any crazy business opportunities right now for a non-technical person even for a technical person like imagine if open AI comes with a standard tomorrow and we all just shift to that right it's very early stages but

I think understanding how this works means you'll understand how the next thing works and when that becomes fin finalized you hit the ground running amen all right Ross Mike Professor Ross Mike there's no one like you we'll include in the show notes where you can follow him for more really clear explanations around this whole AI coding world and uh dude I'll see you in Miami in a few weeks yeah man I appreciate you I'm booking my flight soon so yeah definitely bro I'll see you soon thank you everybody [Music]