Eric Fry made his name in the early 2000s by doing something that felt crazy at the time: walking away from the hottest tech stocks at the peak of the dot-com boom and buying the boring stuff instead. Hotels. Copper miners. Fashion houses. It worked spectacularly. Now he’s running the same play — this time against AI.
Fry’s thesis, laid out in his Smart Money column this week, isn’t that AI is dead. Far from it. His argument is subtler and more historically grounded: at the peak of every dominant tech wave, the best returns don’t come from the dominant technology — they come from the companies that remind people what technology can’t replace. He calls them “AI Survivors.” Think drive-thru coffee shops, luxury goods brands, and physical experiences that feel irreplaceable precisely because they’re not algorithmic.
The data from the dot-com era is hard to argue with. While Cisco, Amazon, and Microsoft all fell more than 50% from their peaks, Fry’s non-tech picks — including Freeport-McMoRan, Humana, and Adidas — delivered triple-digit gains during the same stretch. The pattern: as AI increasingly colonizes daily life, the scarcity premium on authentically human experiences rises. A restaurant in Santa Cruz recently got buried in one-star reviews after using an AI-generated logo. That backlash is a data point, not a fluke.
Major consumer brands are reading the room. Aerie, Le Creuset, and baby products company Coterie have all publicly committed to AI-free social media content. That’s a positioning play, but it’s also a market signal about where a certain kind of consumer loyalty is flowing.
Fry’s current poster child for this thesis is Dutch Bros (BROS) — the drive-thru coffee chain that operates with no inside seating, no kitchens, and no bathrooms. Capital-light, cash-generative, and built on repeat human habit. BROS is down year-to-date, but so is Tesla, Microsoft, and Oracle — all off more than 20%. His view: stay the course. The AI correction creates the entry point, not the exit.
The broader takeaway for investors: the next few years may reward diversification away from AI-pure plays toward businesses with durable human moats. It’s not a bet against technology — it’s a bet that technology, at scale, makes its own antithesis more valuable. The dot-com era proved it once. Fry thinks it’s proving it again.
