Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Vice Chairman Charlie Munger, 95, spoke to Wall Street Journal reporters Nicole Friedman and Jason Zweig for six hours over dinner in his Los Angeles home on April 23. He covered a wide array of subjects. Here is an edited transcript from that conversation and a follow-up telephone discussion.

Q: What do you make of the world-wide fan club that you and Warren Buffett have attracted?

A: Well, the world is very peculiar. And these people that like me are mostly nerds in China or India. It’s a very deep attachment. They’re so passionately interested in improving themselves. Some of them just want to get rich in some easy way, but mostly they’re trying to improve themselves.

An awful lot of graduates of great engineering schools are investors. I wouldn’t call a man who uses computer science to sift vast amounts of data for correlation, and then starts trading the correlation and if it works, keeps going, and if it doesn’t, stops, I wouldn’t call him an investor. It’s really, what he is is a trader. And those correlations are very peculiar…. Of course, the more people that try and trade that one correlation, once they find it, the less well it works.