Omaha is not quite like anywhere I have ever been. I arrived late Thursday from Seattle. The art in my hotel room had Warren Buffett’s name on it.  Another picture on the wall featured Omaha Steaks. I was clearly not home in the Emerald City. Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz would have liked it here.

The next day, I travelled quite early in the day to the Value Investor Conference held at Mammel Hall at the University of Nebraska Omaha. It is a beautiful building made possible by a couple who were early investors in Berkshire Hathaway. Their investment gains resulted in their ability to donate $30 million toward the construction of the school. The conference attendees were from every continent except Antarctica. The Mammels invested in the original partnership and a story was relayed by one speaker about how they once said had about as much information to go on when in vesting with Berkshire as the Madoff investors did. They just trusted Warren Buffett.

The city is about as unpretentious a place as I have ever visited. Omaha seems to still reflect something approaching a Norman Rockwell America. Or at least more so than other places.

I attended a dinner event at the Hilton hotel where my book on Charlie Munger was given as a gift to every guest. I signed a lot of books and talked to many people there. Everyone in attendance was a business school graduate and they said nice things about the book if they had read it. I did not tell anyone that I really wrote the book imagining that Charlie was talking to an ordinary investor who might own a small grocery store.

The speakers at the event were the usual suspects “talking their book” and trying to increase their assets under management. I’m really glad I don’t need to do that since I have a day job unrelated to money management. All my royalties from the book will be given to charity. I haven’t received a cent so far anyway even though it is their bestselling book this year (that’s publishing).

The Berkshire meeting itself was less of a citywide event than I had imagined. Omaha is big enough that attendees did not dominate even the downtown area. Certainly the meeting dominated the Hilton across the street from the event center, and it made hotel rooms hard to get. But Omaha is the nation's 42nd largest city with a population of about 427,000. Security was similar to a TSA screening. Snipers and policemen in patrol cars on hot standby are the new normal.

Listening to people in the crowd was interesting. I expect that many people were there because Warren is a phenomenon. It did not seem from conversations around me that anyone around me actually understood value investing or something like how checklists are used in an acquisition at a big company. Some people seemed bored. Some were listening with rapt attention. Most people there seemed like excellent candidates for a low-cost diversified portfolio of index funds.