The Intellectual Investor’s Guide to Omaha

I’ve been bringing my son Jonah to Omaha on and off for almost a decade. The first time, he was fourteen. He couldn’t sit through the annual meeting – he was preoccupied with anything and everything but Buffett’s wisdom. The highlight of the trip for him was a selfie with Bill Gates. Fair enough.

After that trip, he didn’t ask to come back – for eight years. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, he wanted to return. He came back, sat through almost the entire meeting, and has been coming ever since. For the last three years, both of my older kids – Jonah and my daughter Hannah – have accompanied me.

The year Hannah first came, she was eighteen. She arrived a little skeptical and left announcing to my wife that she was going back next year. My wife was surprised. “Jonah is into finance,” she said. “You’re not. Why?” Hannah’s answer: “I got to meet so many interesting people and had so many terrific conversations. None of them were about finance. I learned so much.”

That’s exactly right. This is what Buffett and Munger built – an ecosystem that rewards curiosity, not credentials. You don’t have to be a CFA to feel at home here. You just have to be genuinely interested in ideas, in people, in learning. Omaha is one of the few places I know where a twenty-two-year-old and a seventy-year-old can sit at the same dinner table and leave having both learned something.

If you have kids who are old enough to hold a conversation, bring them. They may not care about Berkshire Hathaway. They probably won’t remember what Buffett said. But they will remember the people they met, the conversations that surprised them, and the feeling that the world is much larger and more interesting than their daily routine suggests. That’s worth the trip.