The Great AI Debate: Opportunity of a Lifetime or Bubble Waiting to Burst?

0:01This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. hello hello welcome back um we've got a little bit of a surprise uh episode here surprise in that your main man uh anthony chung well he's actually decided to um sod off to paris can you believe um ditching his responsibilities and his his duties to his audience and so it just leaves me and you Stephen to come together.

0:55Yeah this is amazing. It's very very rare that I speak to you and you know we're both on the same podcast and we're just at different sides and it's like a solar eclipse right? Very very special but if you don't wear those funny glasses your eyes are going to get burnt. this is it I think we did do one episode it actually might have been with Ant though so I think this is this may be the first I'm not sure how many episodes we've done it's probably like not sure what episode this is it's got to be over 250 anyway I think this might be the very first time we've uh we've we've gone solo without without without the boss man so yeah it's gonna be a car crash it's gonna be an absolute car crash I do what I do think that Ant holds this whole thing together and he's very good at bringing me and you back to topic and back to a sense of time and structure so yes whether this becomes a total garbled uh rant we'll find out but i tell you what is i thought i thought i'd do a little bit of prep before this episode so i am quite frank i don't always listen to your episodes um i tend to get my financial news elsewhere thanks yeah sorry about that but no i i heard it was your birthday week and uh yeah i also heard that there was a bit of a bit of chat on the comments uh about what age what birthday it was did you see these comments i did see the comments i was yeah there was a fair way i didn't actually crunch the numbers to see what the exact average age was i do feel it was lower than my actual age though uh well i mean i tell you there was some pretty wide outliers there were some outliers yeah exactly so i did i ran the numbers oh you did and across all the comments so far this is we're recording friday the 6th across all the comments your age go on according to the listeners 44.8 years old you take that that is a win that's a big now there was a really good clustering around that 43 44 mark now there was definitely one person that wanted to troll you and said you were 65 but you look good for a 65 year old and then and then i think singh mehul one of the one of the uh speculators i think is looking for a job uh he said you only look 25 so yeah enough with the flattery singh yeah absolutely i mean 44 i'll take that i'll take that because you know obviously that's that's exactly right that's your age yeah i i think actually my favorite one and i'm going to misquote it but it was something like um long uh long 47 take profit of 49 with a stop loss at 46 i think was the comment which i i quite i quite enjoyed oh well i'm not far away i am i had my 40th birthday last week no two weeks ago um and a few weeks before my 40th birthday i got id'd buying glue in vnq so there you go that's because your new your new haircut it's kind of taken a decade off yeah but i was with my daughter at the time so i was a very precocious 17 year old buying glue with my daughter on a saturday morning um anyway what are we going to do right let's well oh, this is it.

4:16We were on our WhatsApp group over the weekend. It's like, what are we going to do? Ant's not here. And so, I mean, I think it was your idea. And it's like, well, let's just have the conversation. Let's just have the conversation. I think there's pretty much only one in town. And that is obviously AI. We've had the midterms, of course, which we'll talk about in a second. But we were on the WhatsApp group going, all right, let's do an AI. And you're suggestion was let's do bull versus bear so here we are and i and then stephen was like look which side you want to take i don't mind and i immediately and and quite confidently typed in the words i will definitely take the bull case yeah it was almost like that was a kind of pre-written thing that you just you send whenever anyone asks you that question this this is it um unfortunately for me i sent that message on monday yeah in the whatsapp group uh then we had tuesday um midterm elections um the blue wave or some some are calling it um the blue the blue nami i've heard what's what they're doing there um but and then we dropped an episode me and an we did it on Wednesday.

5:36I was getting quite excited. I mean, the market reaction was very positive initially. In most corners of the market, there were definitely some exceptions to that. Some corners of the market got heavily pummeled, like the semiconductors specifically, some of the oil majors, for example. But broadly, it was very risk-on, and we were spinning the argument as to why. Unfortunately, then the following day, Thursday, so that's yesterday as we're recording this, we had actually one of the biggest market blowouts for many, many, I don't know how long it is, to be honest, but the NASDAQ was down over 5 % at one point.

6:18You had a proper old-fashioned sell everything that's not nailed down kind of session, and it felt pretty ugly. Is this, you know, I'm not, I'm not a markets person and you definitely are. Is this, is this the equipment was yesterday? And again, we're speaking on Friday the 6th was yesterday the equivalent of, you know, when you really, really want to break up with someone and you've been waiting for the right moment and maybe the night before, you know, they dance with your best friend or something like that. And you use that as the trigger to break up. Was that, was that what happened with the midterms or not not quite that's a bit uh i i yeah possibly i mean i think that there's two parts to this i believe um and we're going to get into it right because obviously one of your arguments you taking the bear case i'm assuming is going to be peddling the whole bubble um argument um and maybe i'm getting ahead of the conversation a bit here but And, you know, I think what happened was a direct reaction to, obviously, the scale of the win from the Democrat side, meaning that, and particularly that data center, I'm feeding your argument here, but that kind of, that the voters have said their word and data centers are not for us kind of interpretation of the result, right?

7:46And so then you've had that panic, I would say, on Thursday. Anybody who's in the business of building data centers and that's the service or products that they're supplying for that process, I think they're the ones that got immediately tanked. But is it a bubble bursting? I mean, I would say the semiconductor sector very specifically, that narrow sector, you know, that's been selling off for a few months. Yes, it's June, right? I'd say it's been a slow deflation. And, you know, we're 50 % down on some of these stocks, right? But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself here. Yeah, you are. And look, and I think it's really important to know, we're going to do the bulls versus the bears, and we're going to do a bit of a debate style where you're going to introduce your kind of bull case, and I'll do the same with the bear case, and then we'll have a chat.

8:37But I think it's also worth using the volatility in the market at the moment as a learning point to say, you know, there's a lot of noise out there, right? I mean, we're looking at markets today and, you know, there's a lot of recovery. There's a decent amount of bounce back. And by the time this episode goes out on Sunday through Monday, something else might have happened, right? So we're going to try and present arguments, maybe from a, not a 30 ,000 foot view, but at least a 10 ,000 foot view and not get overly distracted by the day to day. So, Piers, I want you to give it a go. Give me your bookcase because I need some reassurance.

9:21Well, this is not investment advice. And spoiler, I probably do own some of these stocks that I might be discussing in the next 10, 15 minutes. That said, this is my bull case. Are you ready? Basically, look, the bear case, as I've said, partially, and we're going to hear from you, is this bubble argument. So firstly, I want to address that. Bubbles historically have a signature, okay? And you can go back, the railway mania of the 1840s, housing bubble bursting in 2008, shale oil. Look, there've been many, many bubbles that have then crashed, but there's been one commonality that preceded the crashes.

10:02And you get a combination of three factors at the same time. Falling prices, rising inventory or supply, and then idle or slowing capacity. Okay. So it tends to be supply overtaking demand is the typical function that then leads to a collapse. Now, I'm going to argue very strongly that in this AI-specific case, we've actually got the exact opposite. So, on the demand side, I'm going to put forward, look, demand is accelerating. Also, a lot of the demand side from some of the big players in this data center build-out race and so on have legally binding contracted orders going way out into the future.

10:51And we can see this, like NVIDIA's revenue was more than doubled in the last year, right? 96 billion in one quarter. AWS and Google, you know, some of the big cloud providers, of course, they're sitting on over a trillion dollars of signed, contracted backlog. And look, this is only at the very start, I would say. You know, we're going from, if you think about it, from a consumer demand or a business demand point of view, I think we're in the less than one AI agent per person, a lot less than one. And I think we're going to move into multiple AI agents per person over the next few years. So that's my demand argument.

11:33I'll dive into that in more details. On the supply side, they were just sold out. The world's biggest AI memory maker, SK Heimdix, They're sold out through to 2029, which is just staggering. You look at other raw materials, copper, and actually in my research here, tin, I hadn't quite appreciated. These are two really key metals that are required. Tin is a really big component in the whole data center build-out point of view. They're both right up at record prices. Yes, they came off a little bit yesterday. Very true. but by, you know, to all intents and purposes, still up around their all-time highs.

12:16So really, you know, you've got AI labs like Anthropic. They're actually rationing usage at the moment, right? So I would say from a demand and a supply point of view, the dynamics are very strong. And just finally, before I hand over to you for your opening argument, everyone in this AI stat, every player on every layer is making money. And actually, there's some pretty interesting profit margins on each layer, like NVIDIA, 75 % gross margins. Take data center landlords, they're actually raising their rents, so their margins are going up. Cloud providers, you know, the big guns, AWS, Google, Microsoft, they're basically running operating margins of 36 % to 39%.

13:05And then finally, the big reveal in Anthropics S1, they're making an operating profit. So you've kind of got four layers there, right? You've got the chips, you've got the data centers, you've got the cloud providers, and then finally you've got the model providers. And they're all making profit. And so I would say my argument is that this is very much a bullish, secular shift. and yes, we're going to get wobbles and volatility like we've definitely just had, but I'm staying strong. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new.

13:46It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. All right, Piers, that was brilliant and also extremely compelling. I love your point about, well, I mean, the size of these numbers is just staggering. Trillion dollars of backlog, profitable at all levels. I take it. Here's my riposte.

14:26and by the way sorry i've kind of gone into uh undergraduate essay mode here so apologies here we go all right peers i remember when during my first year at cambridge we were lucky enough to witness one of the few remaining philips machines which was a hydraulic model of the uk economy that used colored water in place of money, if you remember. The Phillips machine, or to be precise, the Monetary National Income Analog Computer, was built by this Kiwi engineer turned economist, Bill Phillips, in 1949, and served to show thousands of economics undergraduates how the circular flow of the economy really worked.

15:20Phillips was building this thing, which is quite a cool piece of kit and we'll put a photo of it on the channel. There's one in the Bank of England Museum. Is it working? I'm not sure if it's working. If anyone's ever in town by Bank tube station. Bank of England, that's why it's called Bank. They've got a museum. Go check it out. Yeah, and it's a fascinating old school piece of kit. But anyway, so Phillips was building this thing at the time of peak Keynesianism, post-war, post-beverage reports, a nation of new garden towns and the birth of the NHS and the welfare state and things like that. And the Phillips machine showed how by opening the spigots of government spending, money would trickle down into the pockets of individuals who would play their economic role as consumers and start buying more.

16:14More consumption resulted in more money flowing to the P &Ls of companies and ultimately back to the government in the form of new taxes. You know, Keynesian economics, right? According to economic logic, the economy will also grow when the taps of investment and consequently, one would hope, increased productivity are also switched on. This is where AI comes in. So the entire outsized AI bet is premised on whole economy productivity gains resulting from significant capital investments. If this turns out not to be true, then much of this investment could and probably will be wiped out. That's$570 billion of AI-related borrowing, according to Morgan Stanley.

17:08And that number doesn't take into account, obviously, the equity capital that's bound up in this story, which is probably orders of magnitude higher. And to be totally honest, so far, the productivity gains are nowhere to be seen outside of the Mag 7 and this increasingly circular network of AI companies, right? From the picks and the shovels to the labs and the fabs. So what are we left with? When it comes to the AI build out, forget the Philips machine and the circular flow and think instead of the circular washing machine. You like that? In the incestuous world of artificial intelligence, money circles round and around.

17:51I'm trying to get a job as a journalist here. Through equity investments and loan guarantees, through compute agreements and rental deals for spare capacity, this investment and the resulting expenditure produced extremely narrow, very short-term GDP growth, growth which doesn't trickle across to the rest of the real economy. As Katie Martin put it in the FT, in a crisis, circular financing becomes a circular firing squad. And I think we're starting to see a little bit of that at the moment. But wait, I want to pull back and get into your territory, Piers, and talk about the wider economy. We started by talking about government spending as a key lever in the Phillips machine, stepping in to stimulate the economy in times of capital retrenchment.

18:44Here is where I'm probably most pessimistic. Governments, as you well know, from Europe to the US, no longer have the capability for fiscal intervention in their economies. Whatever Andy Burnham says about not being in hock to the bond markets, the fact of the matter is just as i am in hock to my mortgage provider we are right so what does this mean it means we can't spend our way out of an economic crisis or a prolonged recession due to a catastrophic white house set of policies we're left with persistent inflation a result of oil prices and trade wars this keeps interest rates unnaturally high for this stage in the business cycle, in this stage of the economic cycle, which leaves government with limited wiggle room to spend their way out of trouble.

19:34We saw this with last week's budget here in the UK. We're seeing this in France at the moment. We see this in the US's$2 trillion 2026 deficit. How bad could this all get? Well, in the short term, it could be very bad. According to investor Paul Kedrosky, AI has reached its Minsky moment when credit growth runs out of good projects and starts funding bad ones. As with any bubble, we are simply desperate for the party to keep going. The equivalent of shouting one more song at a beleaguered provincial DJ. But when the bubble buzzburst or maybe more optimistically deflate we will be left with a few very challenging years all right oh there we go get me a job at the ft oh alpha i'm coming for you i see what you're doing you're you're kind of going macro here so and excuse me i think that yeah i've kind of had this feeling as well over the last months.

20:46It's been that sort of almost like a two-horse race where you've got on the one side you've got the economy, the broader economy. Now on the other side you've got this AI secular revolution and it's like well can the productivity gains of the AI revolution come fast enough to actually solve all of these fiscal and broader kind of macro issues. And I think, yeah, I mean, I think you've definitely got some strong arguments there. It's the timing of it all. I want to say counter with two things. Currently, at least as I understand it, the AI boom has not relied on government funding. Well, I mean, you might argue differently in China, but let me just talk, like, let's say US, right?

21:44At the moment, it hasn't relied on any government funding. It has been private or privately backed, the private sector backing, and obviously the hyperscalers are stumping up the cash. and so I think that whilst you are 100 % right fiscally these governments are not in any position to start to ramp up spending and stimulate I do think these private businesses have a war chest and I know cash flow issues are starting to raise some alarm bells and so on but I think the privately funded AI boom is still there I would then say, is it the case that when you run out of stuff to, when credit runs out of good places to go, does it then just end up going to bad projects?

22:40And I go back to that point that everyone in the stack is now making money. So is a bad project one that you get a return on investment from? and i think that therefore my opinion is this this train is still in motion is it that everyone in the stack is making money because we are yet to accept that we are we hope that this wider economy productivity boost will happen in the short or at least in the medium term and therefore the equity investors the vc guys the private equity guys the private credit guys are willing to keep rolling the dice in the hope that this follow because that is that is the propulsion that is resulting in everyone quote-unquote making money that money is coming if you think that money's not coming necessarily from spending in the real economy on AI yet.

23:45It's starting to a little bit, you know, clawed impressive, but still really, really small relative to the magnitude of the build out. So that profit is coming from capital as opposed from demand. Well, I look at, you know, I look at the use cases out there. You know, we are very much i would say still in the early and i would probably even go as far as i say the very early adoption phase now my my brother's a good example now how many episodes of this show have we done i was guessing at 250 plus no he was reminding me oh is it that many wow okay yeah i know i know um yeah for for a 40 40 for a 44.8 year old you've done a lot of that he was reminding me last weekend that I'd never given him a shout out on the podcast.

24:38So, Dean, my brother, here's your shout out, here's your moment. I'm going to use you as an example in my argument here. So he runs a manufacturing business.

24:49He builds PCBs, right? So electronic manufacturing business. His business, he's got like 300 employees roughly. I'm going to get these numbers slightly wrong. And I would say, he was telling me at the weekend that right now there's probably about three employees that use AI tools. Three. And those three are like the absolute champions and they are all over it in inverted commas and are starting to now really make some headway in terms of making processes way more efficient. And they're about to now really roll this out and drive a wider adoption. So they're going to go from three users to something like 30 users like next year.

25:37Okay. And this is going to drive huge efficiencies and therefore productivity gains for that business. I think that's just quite, that's probably a very typical situation. And so I think, hang on, I've got a backup point as well. Okay. That's one point. So I think that adoption phase is gathering momentum. Now look, there'll be some casualties there. In this adoption phase, people are trying it. out everyone in in other companies and in fact like in in amplify to be honest everyone uses ai tools and to a certain degree some of that spend is probably i mean wasted is one word you could use in that we're just trying it out seeing if it's going to work and so that's that adoption phase can be quite messy right but i would say this is a different point entirely um elon musk is planning to, by the end of next year, is planning to have hit a run rate of building 1 million Optimus robots per year, right?

26:44He'll be at that run rate by the end of next year. So obviously all of these robotic, we're right at the start, I would say, of the robotic boom. And each of those robots are going to need AI licenses, let's say, to operate. So I think we're on the cusp of that demand. In my view, the demand's only going to go up, and therefore the whole stack is going to become even more profitable, so people are going to want to carry on funding it. And so I think this thing can still go. Yeah, so I think if we were doing this debate live at the Oxford Union, let's just say, I would have been nodding along with you during the brother Dean anecdotes and the optimization and the adoption phase.

27:34And then I would have given myself a nice big smile when you said Elon Musk and Optimus robots. Because I think I would have just won the argument by you introducing the fantastical nature of this speculative bubble that we are seeing, right? I want to see cold, hard numbers. And I'm going to give you some real world stories, anecdotes, and some numbers about how volume doesn't necessarily equate to value. So there was that classic meter study. So METR 2025 studies that said that coders felt 20 % faster with AI. That the number of commits ended up being down 20%. They call it digital cocaine, right?

28:25And obviously this is... So hang on, when was that? Sorry, when was that? This is late 2025. I know that since then we've had... 12 months ago. Yeah, we've had, you know, codecs and things like that. But there definitely is this feeling that more volume doesn't equal more value. I'm going to give you two more examples. So new apps. In the first half of 2026, the number of apps released on the App Store doubled. downloads increased by two percent right so volume doesn't necessarily equal value thirdly you would have thought that ai for it would be kind of ground zero for u.s law firms right we've got all of these venture-backed companies delivering brilliant well purportedly brilliant AI tools for legal services.

29:15Build hours in 2025, in the first half of 2026, build hours per case kept rising, right? So even though we have all of this productivity unlock in a, what you might consider to be a relatively, a somewhat deterministic and therefore AI appropriate industry, build number of hours per case kept on rising. So something is not adding up here in the real world. And just to speak personally, I definitely do more with AI than I used to, but I also feel more like a spinning top, right? Doing lots and lots of things relatively frenetically and wondering whether I'm heading in the right direction or creating real significant value.

30:10And that might just be from a personal perspective, but I'm still yet to see, you know, that major, major productivity unlocked. Interesting. Yeah, that's an interesting one with the lawyers. I think that, you know, the way, one of the way use cases I would use Claude, for example, is on legal matters regarding running of our business, right? And then those legal matters can be quite broad. It could be we're dealing with a new contract that we're having with a new customer, for example, an SOW. It might be, I don't know, we've hired someone new and so there's an employment contract that we're doing.

30:52Or it might be a HR, you know, a different HR situation. Lots of legal things come up on a weekly basis. I'm able to now use Claude to at least get a lot further down the road than I would have been able to. Now, I know that's maybe suggesting that, well, the billable hours should have gone down then, because if people are now being empowered by Claude to be their own lawyers, essentially. But I think actually you can only go so far down the track as a kind of armchair expert, that nag clawed enables you to be. And I think, is it the case that people are getting, you know, they're going to court more because they're able to go down the track on their own far enough to see that actually I do have a case here, let's lawyer up.

31:39So there might be some of that going on. Yeah, and it might also be just by the by, it might also be that AI is causing much more harm than it's providing good. There might be a lot more legal cases because fridges are getting hacked in Sweden and France. And there's going to be a lot of legal cases there. Cyber security issues, the world over. AI slot, deep fakes, all of this stuff. Maybe legal billable hours are going up because AI is infecting the world. And that's why so many Americans hate it. So this is like, we're straying into that argument of, how is it going to disrupt the job market?

32:18How is AI going to impact on human beings doing jobs And I think when you look back at other revolutions, you tend to get this phase where to start with, it doesn't eliminate human beings in jobs. It actually enables human beings in those jobs, they keep their jobs, but it enables them to be more productive and do more. I mean, actually, there's a really good stat. I'm going to get the numbers wrong, so forgive me, I'm going to roughly guess, but Microsoft, in the last 24 months, I believe their revenue's gone up by 50%, very broad, roughly. Their revenue has increased by 50%. And in that time, their headcount, employees, is flat.

33:09but you'll find you'll find that that is a very very that is a mag 7 or a tech you know vc-backed tech company focused phenomenon that doesn't mean that it won't trickle out um but we're not we're not seeing that in any in other in other industries that's why i brought up my brother because for me that was like oh okay that's interesting and i will say there's one other right the strand to this which is the agentic phase and look you know meta i think the most downloaded app on the app store was meta's muse i think it was the number one app which is this kind of agentic you know you you get this thing to do stuff for you in your personal life right well this agentic phase and look is it going to come through is it going to be popular is there going to be adoption or not and how quick obviously lots of question marks there but typically what happens if you get an agent working for you that agent will use more kind of compute and ai than you would as an individual so if we do shift into this agentic phase again i think the demand curve is only not only sloping higher i still think it's accelerating exponentially.

34:30The authentic phase is interesting. I think a lot of this AI thing comes down to whether you believe that AI is a modest productivity booster or it is a workforce replacer, right? And if you read the SpaceX prospectus and they say the total addressable market for their AI products is 20 trillion, they are betting that this is a workforce replacer, an agentic workforce replacer. And it is almost one of those things that if you believe, you believe. And if you don't, you don't. And it's very hard to convince the other side. But I'm just going to wrap this up with maybe a comment and then a question.

35:20So I was reading about different types of bubbles. And I think there's two guys called Byron Hobart and Tobias Huber, and he's got a book called Boom. And they talk about two different types of bubbles, the mean reversion bubble, which is a destructive bubble, which is about, you know, there is a financial miracle, promising returns, like the South Sea bubble, portfolio insurance, subprime mortgages, and you revert to the mean and all of that value is destroyed. right? Because it's basically like a Ponzi scheme, right? But then you have the second type of bubble, which is an inflection bubble, which is a productive bubble, a genuine technological breakthrough, railroads, electricity, the internet.

36:07And I think we all agree that AI is one of those, which might result, like those other bubbles, in short-term pain, where we all get over our skis from a credit perspective and from a valuation perspective. But then in five to 10 years time, we see this kind of new crop of companies that have figured it out. You know, the green shoots coming after a bit of a controlled burn. And that's where, you know, maybe we can... I just want us to end well. Maybe we can both be right, is what I'm going to say. It's going to be bad in the short, good in the long. yeah and i think what i think we're having that bad in the short now but i don't think that necessarily the setup is right as in now you know start of november 2026 i don't think the setup is quite right for a big blowout episode like we had dot-com bubble bursting it might be that we come to one of those moments later um but again it's kind of back to my point that the supply and demand dynamics they're kind of you well do i say unique maybe not unique but right now they're still very powerfully pointing in one direction and i think there's there's an interesting new element to this that i don't think you can really look back on other bubbles and and kind of see a similar thing and that that is the the the rollout the supply because that's what happened you know the internet The dot-com bubble crashed because, or the railroad crashed.

37:45We had this massive overbuild and the infrastructure build got ahead of the demand and then the whole thing crashed, right? There's one throttling lever on all of this and it's out of the control of any of those people in the stack that I mentioned. And that is, it's really a government level. And this comes back to the midterms. Data center build out, number one. Number two, just straight up, power, like electrons to power any of this, right? These are very, very, in very short supply. Has the supply of those just got even shorter given the midterm election results? So I think that there's a barrier to getting an infrastructure overbuild because of those third-party government forces that are kind of throttling it back.

38:38And I think that's an interesting dynamic we perhaps haven't seen in one of these other previous revolutions according to piers curran this time it's different this is not going to be like the other bubbles we've seen before well look let's go i think we did all right without ant yeah not bad no not bad a little bit waffly well the comments the comments will will be the judge of that and actually what do the listeners think who's on who's on my bull side who's on stephen's bear side get your comments in the in the chat And who's on Ant's side just having a lovely time in Paris? Yeah. Not worrying about all this market.

39:12Doom and gloom. Yeah, indeed. Good for him. Well, Piers, thank you for your time. Until next time, let's not leave it 250 episodes. Yeah, agreed. All right, see you later. Take care. Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just$5. only at McDonald's for a limited time. Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.