Last fall, we joined several of our Motley Fool Rule Breakers teammates on a weeklong "innovation tour" through Silicon Valley, where we met with executives at InterMune (Nasdaq: ITMN), Copart (Nasdaq: CPRT), and several other Rule Breakers in the making.

We also had the pleasure of meeting with Silicon Valley legends Guy Kawasaki -- an early software evangelist for Apple -- and venture capitalist Bill Gurley, who served as lead analyst on the Amazon IPO.

But perhaps our most interesting meeting was with another man, a figure no doubt familiar to just about everyone in the business world. We watched him work his magic on a touch-sensitive PC we're still salivating over. We got a closer look at one of the two local eateries he owns. We even got firsthand details on his new book.

Then we struck a nerve
Little did we know that his passion for personal finance is matched only by his utter disdain for stocks. You see, this keen observer of business and management trends believes that most people, himself included, cannot beat the market buying individual stocks, especially when the companies behind those stocks are run by drunken chimpanzees.

It's a fair point: Drunken chimps can't do much. Yet according to finance professor Kenneth French -- one-half of the team that revealed the market-beating potential of small-cap value stocks such as American Oriental Bioengineering (NYSE: AOB) -- investors paid $99.2 billion in fees trying to beat the market during 2006, and they were on pace to spend more than $100 billion in 2008.

Confusing the confusopolies
And that doesn't even address today's business climate. First there were meltdowns at Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and AIG . Then came a record year for dividend cuts and suspensions, which burned investors in everything from Constellation Energy (NYSE: CEG) to Ryland Group (NYSE: RYL).

So, it's not hard to see why Dilbert creator Scott Adams quips that Dogbert, CEO of Confusopoly Corp . (TICKER: HUH), could convince the world's bankers that an active market for commercial paper would melt Greenland. Or that ritual cat sacrifices are the key to saving America's auto industry.

Laugh all you want, but bankers at Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS), and elsewhere are the same Harvard-stupid morons who thought that credit derivatives weren't all that risky. Who's to say they wouldn't believe a cartoon character? Or that they wouldn't find synergies between CDOs and cat sacrifices? They're eerily similar, after all -- both begin with the letter "c."

Bottom line: Adams told us that his severe distrust of weasels -- er, management -- is the main reason for his swearing off individual stocks. Makes sense to us. Investors were right to distrust the optimists at KB Home (NYSE: KBH), among others. Continued...