cannot guess when that would be ready. my guess is pass the senate timeline. >> we will keep following you on twitter. the website, ask so much. -- thanks so much. a.coming up next, q and at 7:00, we open the phone lines and take a look at today's headlines. house homeland security committee chair, michael mccaul gives a state of national security address. >> mr. james talks about his book "the man from the train," the solving of a century-old

serial killer mystery. brian: bill james, in your new book "the man from the train," your first sentence is "i have long been fascinated by the notion that knowledge can be created about the past." tell us more about that. bill: the easiest example is dinosaurs. for thousands of years people had no idea that these great beasts had ever existed. now we have not only created information about them, but disseminated it so widely that every 4-year-old child has a collection of little plastic dinosaurs. much of what academics do is sort out the conflicts of what was said at the time to create a clearer and more detailed and more accurate picture of the past so that we know things about the romans that the romans didn't know. we know things about baseball

in the 1960's that the baseball players in the 1960's did not know. brian: when did you know you wanted to write this particular book? bill: i stumbled into it without making a decision to do it. i was supposed to be working on a book with my wife, which i am still working on, about the history of kansas. i saw a pbs show about the murders in villisca, iowa and thought i would put a couple of hours into tracking down what facts i could about it. a couple of hours became a couple of weeks. a couple of weeks became a couple of months, and eventually seven years. brian: when was the bbs documentary shown? bill: i would guess 2008 or 2009, but i am not sure. brian: i want to ask you to read your opening page just to set the scene on what we are about to talk about. bill: all right.

it is a warm night, most often on a weekend. there is a very small town with a railroad track that runs through the town, or sometimes along the edge of it. you can't get more than a few hundred feet away from the railroad track and still be in the town. he is looking for a house with no dog. he would prefer a house on the edge of town, just isolated enough to provide a little bit of cover. a big two-story house would be best, with a family of five. a barn where you can hide out from sundown until the middle of the night. era, before the came, almost every house had a barn, even the houses in chicago and philadelphia had barns. he is looking for a house with a woodpile in the front yard and an ax sticking up out of the woodpile. brian: who is he? bill: he is a serial killer as

awful a human being as has ever walked the earth. brian: do you know his name? bill: i do know his name. if you absolutely insist, it is revealed toward the end of the book. brian: i don't insist. i know you have to get to chapter 40 before you find out. of who thisofile guy is and what about villisca, iowa. bill: villisca, iowa is in the southwestern corner of iowa, a town of around 200,000 people. on a night in june 100 and some years ago, all of the lights were out. the city was in this dispute with the electric company over the price of electricity, and they had shut off the street lights. on a monday morning in june, a

man did not report to work named joe moore. on investigation, it was found that there was a house with all the windows covered and eight people murdered with an ax. this was immediately within an hour to what we now call a serial murder, although the term wasn't used then. eight serial murderer who was traveling -- a serial murderer who was traveling the country and killing people. it was immediately recognized that this was another of those cases. brian: have you been to that town? bill: i have, yes. brian: what is it like today? bill: the interior of the town has not done terrifically.

a lot of the highway when -- went a half-mile outside of town, and the general store moved to the edge of town, that sort of thing. but it is still a quiet, peaceful little place, or it is once more. brian: that murder, has anybody ever been found or prosecuted for the murder back in those days? bill: at the time, there were two were three what i would consider bogus prosecutions. a man was arrested and intimidated and beaten and put on trial, not put on trial but indicted for the murders, but the indictment was dropped because there was really no evidence. later a man known as the little minister, reverend lynn kelly, was tried twice for the crimes.

it is my view -- and there are still people who believe that reverend kelly committed the crime -- i regard that as a complete impossibility. brian: how many crimes did you investigate for this book? bill: well, there were an awful lot of crimes that at one point we thought might be related, and ultimately decided had no connection to the story and didn't include in the book anywhere. there are probably 40 to 50 crimes discussed in the book. some of those are relatively low probability of being linked, and some of them are absolutely and unquestionably linked, in my view. i don't mean to make judgments for other people. some of them seem to be unquestionably linked to the villisca murders.

brian: where do you reside? i live about only 180 miles from villisca. brian: how long have you lived there? bill: we moved back to lawrence in 1991. we spent two years in boston while my wife was getting a masters degree from boston university, but otherwise in lawrence since 1991. brian: most people who know the name bill james have no idea you are dealing with crime. what would they say you do for a living? bill: most people would say i am a baseball statistician. you can't use violence to prevent that from saying that. i write about baseball, and i have written about baseball and analyzed baseball almost all of my life, and that is what i am best known for. brian: are you still working for the boston red stocks question -- red sox?

bill: i'm still very proud to do so. and what do you do there? bill: i try to create organized ways of taking about problems and encourage people is in the system to use those organized ways of thinking about problems as much as i can. brian: your daughter helped you write this book. bill: she did. brian: i want to quote from her in a previous interview and get you to expand on it. "i think dad's writing shone the most when he was talking about these small-towns he grew up in. i mean, his parents were born right around these years, and they grew up in the small town mayetta, kansas, the kind of place that the man from the train attacked. i hope readers will take away a greater sense of empathy for these tiny towns that are just as interesting, fascinating and worthwhile as the largest city on earth." why is she saying that?

bill: i reached the book of overconfidence that i knew. i honestly believe that if the man from the train had ever come to mayetta, kansas, i know where he would have gone. i grew up in a small town in the 1950's and very much like the places where the men from the train would have gone. there was no police force on site. there was a county sheriff 10 miles away. i understand not 100 years ago, but 50 or 60 years ago, and i have a lot of -- well, i often

feel that the people who live in those towns are not taken seriously, that they are not respected, that their view of life -- not their political philosophy -- is not respected. brian: can i read from your book what you said? it is one of the more interesting paragraphs of your book. bill: feel free. read the whole book. [laughter] brian: you can expand on this. if you read about crime in a small town you will encounter frequently the comment that the lived in the kind of quiet place where nothing very interesting ever happened. this is a despicable thing to say. this is you writing. it is a form of bigotry directed at the past, and bigotry directed at people who lived in small towns, and worse yet it is ignorant. say, but french, you

it is an ignorant asshole comments, and if you ever say anything like that you are revealing yourself to be an ignorant asshole." bill: that is how i feel about it. i do feel that it is offensive to talk about small towns as places where nothing ever happens. everything meaningful that happens in your life or my life happens just as often to people who live in small towns and to people who lived in small towns 100 years ago as it does to you and me. the meaningful things that happened to us in our lives are that we fall in love, get married, get divorced, have children, the children have problems, we start a career, succeed or fail, go to social events, go to entertainment. all of those things happen just as often and just as profoundly in small towns 100 years ago or in small towns today as they do to people living in new york city or washington or los

angeles today. brian: where did you get this strong feeling about small towns? bill: i grew up in a small town. i live in what people in washington or new york would consider a small town. lawrence, kansas is 80,000 to 100,000, so it is not that small. it is not a feeling. it is an understanding. if you think that nothing happens in a small town it is because you drive through a small town and don't see anything happen, but if you live there, you understand that people are living their lives there and it is just not true that nothing happens there. brian: the title "the man from the train," what does that come from? bill: one of the things that identifies the murderer we are talking about is that many of the crimes happen within 100

yards of a railroad track, and one of the things that helps us identify his crime as opposed to somebody else's is that it usually happens at the intersection of two railroad tracks, presumably because he knew he had to get out. after he committed his crime he had to get out before dawn and didn't want to be stranded there waiting for a train to go through that he could hop on, so being at the intersection of multiple railroad tracks gave him more opportunities to get out of town before the crime was discovered. brian: what do you want people to take from this book? bill: first of all, crimes are serious events. serious people avoid talking about popular crime or

celebrated criminal events because they regard them as trashy and popular cultural events, but crimes are very serious events. they have a huge impact on shaping how people live, even if you are not the victim of the crime. the phenomenon of famous crimes is a serious phenomenon that needs people to stop blowing it off. that would be number one. number two is a better understanding of the time. what i was trying to do was create as much as i could the time and the place where these crimes occurred. tried to get people to

understand that the world was changing very rapidly at that moment, as it normally is, but sometimes more rapidly than others. it is not a static world. it is a rapidly changing world which has a lot of things in common with the way we live now, and many things different. brian: when did you first begin to be interested in numbers? bill: in the spring of 1961 i was captured by a stack of baseball cards and never really escaped. that is where it comes from. brian: how did you develop an understanding of numbers? bill: well, playing around with baseball statistics. i am not anything a mathematician would consider a mathematician. i am very good at doing it in my head, but that is just from thousands of hours of doing it with baseball statistics.

in terms of getting an understanding of what could be done with those, when i went to college at kansas university, 1967 to 1971, i studied economics, and essentially what i have done for my career is take economic methods and apply them to baseball. that essentially is all that i have ever done other than the crime stuff. that is what i have done almost all of my career, take economic models and theories, economist ways of thinking about things, and apply them to baseball related questions. brian: how important -- obviously you do research -- but how important was research to this book, and how you go about

-- and how did you go about it? bill: my daughter was in charge of the research. she became a co-author because in doing the research, she discovered things that were too large to be ascribed to a researcher. at this point you become an author. essentially what we were doing was scraping the dirt away like archaeology, brushing the dirt away from things that were a little bit exposed but mostly hidden. you brush the dirt away from them and you find more, and you have a better, clearer picture of what it is that is under the dirt. i don't know if i answered your question there. our research, rachel's research, was -- not that i did not do a lot of research -- but our research was basically based on

old newspapers. we found day of the crime news stories about all of the crimes in the book, and those are -- first of all, many times the day of the crime description is the most reliable description because more often it gets repeated, the more it becomes like a game of telephone and the facts get lost. but also the description of events which you start with provides direction to other sources. brian: we've got some video that was recorded last year by "the kansas city star" of your daughter talking about looking for this man, the man from the train, so we can see the two of you together working.

rachel: i think that he was acting out some horrible trauma that happened to him in childhood. i think you was probably viciously abused, was never loved and cared about, and he was acting out that horror throughout, and i think that there was a sexual motivation as well. as horrible as that is to say, i think that became what his life was about. that became his purpose in life. brian: what is her background? bill: she was born in 1986, grew up in that house where the video was shot, the house where he -- we lived, and went to study at holland university in roanoke, virginia. not too far from here. majored in creative writing, was

married in maybe 2011, three years after she graduated. moved back to kansas in maybe 2013 or 2014 and worked with me on the book. brian: one of the chapters is called "the worst one ever." it goes into some detail about this guy, what he did. why do you call it "the worst worst one ever?" bill: because it is the highest body count. in villisca, he killed eight people in one night, which is a horrific event, but it actually is, we were quite astonished to discover, not the most people he killed and one event. whereas the crimes in villisca are quite well-known today, and millions of people know about them and can tell you something

about them, the murder of this family is so obscure that i actually joined the historical society of the county where the crimes occurred in florida. brian: near allentown, florida? bill: near allentown. could not find anyone in the historical society of the town -- county where the crime occurred to had heard about it. they are absolutely forgotten except for the old newspaper accounts. the murders were difficult to write about because, not to speak ill of southerners in any way, but the south at that time

had low levels of literacy, and because there were low levels of literacy and a thin population, there were not many newspapers active in the area. there is no reason to believe that anyone from a newspaper organization ever visited the scene of the crime or ever interviewed a neighbor or police officer firsthand. just secondhand reports is all you have to go on, and you know, we have reconstructed what happened as best we could with as much confidence as we could without trying to fool anyone that we actually know what happened because the facts are difficult. brian: page 288, i will just start reading.

"the ackermans had probably left a kerosene lamp burning and a back bedroom and likely the first thing he did was to take the shade off the land and put it quietly on the floor, then start to examine the layout of the house. mrs. ackerman however was awake nursing her baby inside one of the other rooms. you say i'm speculating that she was awake. if you have ever had a two-day-old baby, you will know why, and her body was found outside the front door." what did this guy do then in the ackerman house? bill: we assume he broke in through a rear window. you can assume he did that because he always did. in fact, he loved windows, so much so that if there was a door and a window that both could be easily opened, he would go through the window. he just preferred to do that.

he was a small man, very athletic, and it was easy for him to scramble through windows. there are two reasons to think he entered from the rear of the house. one is that he always did, and the other is that some of the victims, three i believe, including the two day old baby, were found outside the front door as if they had been chased in that direction toward the front of the house and hit with an ax just after they exited the front of the house. brian: i kept asking, why didn't any of these folks get away from this guy? in all the incidents they seem to all die. bill: that is one of the most workable things about the series of crimes is the remarkably low number of people who lived through the event in any way,

shape, or form. and that is because he was quite exceptionally good at what he did. he was not a dumb person. he was very skilled at what he was trying to accomplish. it must be that he attacked a attacked very quickly. brian: you say there were 33 things that you could tag to this man, and i have it marked here. how did you find the 33? you list every one of them. bill: we started with a list of five and added. not 33 things totally different, but 33 elements of the crime. for example, he very often takes -- in that era, many houses did

not have electricity. they had electricity in these small towns where he were attacking. people would leave a lamp burning through the night so that there would be a lamp that have a starting place in the morning. he would take the shade off of the lamp and put it very quietly on the floor, and then turn the lamp down very low so it was just a flicker. i think he did that in part because, of course, he needed to see his way around the house, but also it excited him. that ghastly thin light was part of the thrill for him, i believe. it is just speculation, getting into his head as much as you possibly can without going crazy. i think that was part of the

thing for him. so that is one thing that identifies a crime linked to the man from the train, as opposed to a similar crime doesn't turn out to be linked. another of course is proximity to the railroad, the intersection of multiple railroads. another is the use of an ax. it is always the blunt side of the ax. brian: always? bill: i shouldn't say always. very often when he kills five people, one person, most likely to be the woman of the house, is struck with the sharp side of the ax also. however, there is no crime in the group in which most of the murders were not committed with the blunt side of the ax. that is the signature element. we have no reason to believe

that he ever killed anyone in daylight, although, you know, this is a vicious human being. if he took a notion to kill someone in daylight, he probably would have, but we have no reason to believe he killed anyone in daylight. always near midnight. not 4:00 a.m., not 3:00 a.m. within an hour of midnight. brian: he paid special attention to the body of the prepubescent female, staging or posing of the prepubescent female, while other victims are simply left as they were when they were killed. often i think i read in these accounts that these young ladies would be around nine years old. bill: a nine to 12-year-old girl is his target victim.

he enjoys killing people, but his target victim is a nine to 12-year-old girl. another signature element is that he covers the heads of the victim with a blanket before he hits them over the head, and he does that so that the blood doesn't spray back on him. so if you see people -- if the report of a crime shows the victim's heads being covered with cloth before they are murdered, that is a sign it is him. if there is a young girl and her clothing has been removed and she is lying with her limbs askew, that definitely is him. there are grosser aspects to that which we maybe don't need to talk about. another thing that we know is

him is he uses cloth to block all the windows. he would take blankets or robes or whatever and cover all of the windows. that is presumably done after the crimes are committed so that he can move around the house in the darkness without being spotted by people walking on the sidewalk. brian: you say he never stole anything. bill: the first crime he stole some, but no, he never stole anything. and many of the crimes it is reported that there was money and jewelry left in plain view after the crime was committed. brian: how often did he set fire to the house? bill: up until 1908 he almost

always set fire to the house. after 1908, he is murdering families in houses near small towns, but not actually in small towns. beginning in 1908 to 1910, he begins to move into small towns. at that point he can't set fire to the house at 4:00 in the morning people will come running and be aware that something is terribly wrong before you have a chance to escape. brian: so he committed the crimes almost always in warm weather? bill: always in warm weather. there is one crime that could be related that is committed in terrible cold weather. the first crime he committed in 1898 was in cold weather. i suspect that that is relevant because after that he had to walk six or seven miles in the

middle of the night in cold order to avoid detection, in order to get out of the way. this is generally true of surly -- serial murderers that their first crime is an explosion and is poorly planned or not planned at all. it is an explosion of anger or lust or a commendation thereof. after that there is normally a cooling off period, and during the cooling off period the person contemplates what they need to do to get by with this in the future. i feel relatively certain that in that period of study and contemplation -- study and contemplation are good words for that, there is nothing good about this -- he decided he didn't want to do this in cold

weather anymore because, other than that one crime in nova scotia in february, about the coldest you can get, there were no crimes in cold weather. brian: what was his profession? bill: going back to the first crime, at the time of the first crime people would say that he was trained in veterinary medicine. that doesn't mean what it means now. but he had some skills working with animals. he had been a sailor, but his main profession throughout the period of time he is committing the crimes is what we would call a lumberjack. we know that that is true because almost all of the crimes

up until 1910 occur, and some after 1910, in towns where the chief industry is logging. brian: i want to talk to you about a lot of the other things you get involved in, basically your philosophy of life. by the way, does anybody ever say to you, bill, why do you spend your time with all this stuff? bill: people do look askance at the time that i spend on looking into old murders, and it is regarded as odd and somewhat offputting by many people i know. it is newspapers that were my basic education. i went to grade school, high

school, college, but from the time i was five years old until i was -- until newspapers died, i was an avid reader of newspapers, and newspapers shaped my view of the world. i grew up in a small town quite a ways from industry, from forestry. our lives were as rich and complicated as the lives of people in big cities, but i remember when i was about 11 years old asking my sister what an antique store was. we didn't have antique stores. there were a lot of things you didn't have in small towns in those times. i used newspapers to figure out the world, more or less.

i think people in my generation did. if you look at newspapers, there's sports and crime stories and comics and dear abby and one page of political commentary, and those things formed my view of the world. i read crime stories and crime books since i was seven years old. brian: i have to admit, following you in baseball is one thing. seeing that you are interested in crime is another. but this is, i have to say, in doing research on your visit here, the biggest surprise i had. this is from "the new yorker" in 2003, a profile on you. "he turns on c-span, which he watches more than any other channel, and finds another politician lying, thus presenting the kind of puzzle he has been trying to solve all his life.

'you have to try to reconstruct the organization of your thoughts so that it reaches the point of depending -- of defending the absurd proposition that they are defending, and the organization of your own thought so that you have a place to put the true fact which is consistent with your underlying belief.'" give us more. bill: first of all, i have no memory of having said that. i don't read anything written about me, although great admiration for the author. i never read that piece. it touches on my central philosophy of life, which is this. i can explain this in about 20 seconds. the world is much more complicated than the human mind, and for that reason -- and yet we are desperate to understand the world.

we are committed from the moment of birth to a struggle to understand the world which we can never win. because that is true, we make up understandings of the world which we call religion or political philosophy or expertise, and we believe these things are true. as consequence of that, we all believe thousands of utterly nonsensical statements to be true. ben says that politicians are lying, but i don't know that they are lying quite. politicians say things that are not objectively true with great frequency, but it is not clear to me that they do not in

general believe these things to be true. they are merely operating out of a paradigm of understanding which has wandered away from the facts which can be established. does that make any sense at all? brian: i will just let it lie. [laughter] let me ask you though, do you still watch this? what you see from lawrence, kansas that we don't see from this place? bill: that is the reason that i am a c-span junkie, is your discipline and commitment to getting as close to the facts without your interpretation, your own overlaying of it, as you possibly can do.

i take a lot of crap from my liberal friends because i watch fox news, but i also watch cnn and pbs. it is not that i -- i have always tried to figure out the world, as everybody is, but i am always trying to create organized ways of thinking about the world, and c-span is more useful for that than sources which think they have the world figured out, if that makes sense. brian: you tweet. i will ask you in a second why. here is one of your tweets in december. "how many of us are old enough

to remember when meet the press and face the nation would spend the whole hour interviewing a newsmaker rather than 10 minutes with a newsmaker and 50 minutes was talking head?" the 10 minutes with a newsmaker and 50 minutes with a talking head is successful. why do you think it is more successful than the old way? bill: it is part of a system that has developed. we headed in that direction when people, probably in the lbj administration, but when the politicians started showing up for the morning news shows with a list of talking points and pushing the direction. then it became inevitable that the newspeople would try to get

away from the talking points, that they would try to escape the talking points. the talking head format developed as a way -- let me come at this from a different angle. my philosophy of life is that everyone has to have a system of understanding everything, and that is unfortunate because all of the systems of understanding everything are bullshit. no one understands the world. no one has the capacity to understand the world, and all of the carefully articulated systems to place everything are inherently false, but everyone has one.

almost everyone is either a conservative or a liberal or a libertarian or a lunatic of some other stripe. in a competitive news environment, the thing to do is to find the underserved group of partisans and find a way to appeal to them. brian: here is a tiny little bit of your philosophy. this is the 17 seconds. you made a speech in november of 2016. [video clip] bill: one of the great problems with the human race is that greed has no limit. is greed had a natural limit -- if greed had a natural limit we would all work through our problems a lot quicker, but it doesn't.

brian: why doesn't greed have a natural limit? bill: organized religion and philosophy and politics are efforts to form philosophies which place limits on the catastrophic consequences of greedy behavior. but as to why i believe that greed has no natural limit has to do with 60 years of reading crime books. criminals are simply people who put more value on their two minutes of pleasure than they do on your life. the man from the train of more

value on his hour of satisfaction than he did on the 100 or so people that he killed. his greed had no limit. most of us limit our greed. most of us limit our greed by philosophy or religion, but it has no inherent and natural limit if philosophy and religion are taken away. brian: as a baseball aficionado and observer and advisor and all of that for the boston red sox, you look at the baseball business, what do you think will happen with the incredible amount of money being paid for somebody to throw a baseball or hit a baseball and the agents and the team owners and all of

that, and the cost of the rights for television as they keep going up? where does that all go, and is there any greed in that mix? bill: brian, i know you try not to express opinions, but there is absolutely greed in that mix. in the long-term, eventually a competitive structure will evolve which results in a more reasonable distribution of the assets of games. eventually there will be -- either the major sports will expand to where they have 200 teams each or there will be competitive leagues established so that there are 200 teams in each sport in the united states.

once that happens, the money that gets concentrated into relatively few hands will blow across the horizon more. however, is that going to happen in the next five years? probably not, but it will happen at some point in the next two lifetimes or so. brian: another 38 seconds of your philosophy in a speech you gave at longwood university back in 2015. [video clip] bill: certainty is the immediate cause of the most awful in -- awful injustices in the world. there is a story in the last week or so that fbi analysts for dna have testified improperly over a long period of time, almost always for the prosecution, and now a society

will have to come to terms with that. bill: why did you want to say -- brian: why did you want to say that in that speech? bill: it is the core of my belief system, these philosophies we create out of nothing, these false explanations of all phenomena in the world, are the core of our being. that was the news story which was in the news at that time, and so i picked that up and used it to tie into the general point i was making. however, i was also working on this book at that time. at the time i gave that speech i was working on the book.

one of the things that happened in these towns where the man from the train committed his crimes is that in at least two cases, what would always happen is that people would decide based on no evidence at all that they knew who committed the crime. but in at least two cases, and possibly three, black men were murdered by lynch mobs because they were certain that this person had to have committed the crime. if you go back and look at what was their reason for believing that, it was nothing. but the certainty that they knew who committed the crime led to injustice, as it always does. i was terribly bothered by the case of ryan ferguson, a young man in missouri who spent

several years in prison for a crime that should have been obvious for anyone who looked at it for 20 minutes he could not have possibly committed. but the prosecutors were certain that they knew what happened, and their certainty that they knew what happened led to injustice. if you look at any crime story and walk backward on it and say, where did this crime story began, the answer is that it always begins in a fantasy. basically all crimes begin in a fantasy. to look at a case of injustice and walked backward and say, where did this injustice originate, it originates in the certainty that we know what happened when in reality we do not know what happened. brian: i found this to be a bill james-ism. i'm not sure it is.

at the end of the book in the acknowledgments, i want to ask why you wrote this sentence this way. "i would like to thank some very nice lady at the kansas historical society who may have been susan forbes, sara keckleson or sarah garten. i am sorry, i have lost the slip of paper that had your name on it." bill: i did some research at the kansas historical society and wrote down the name of the very nice lady who helped me, but i lost the name and rather than pretending i knew who it was and thanking the wrong person, i just thanked them all. brian: why didn't you call them and ask them? bill: it was two or three years later and i did not think they would remember me. also i am lazy. [laughter] brian: chapter three was written by your daughter, and it starts

out "i was not yet an author on the book, just a research assistant." brian: the reason i ask that is has anybody else ever found someone they thought was the man from the train? you name a person, tell us where he died, all that kind of stuff. i am not going to give it away here, but were you the first people to discover this? bill: we were the first people to tie him to the crime. there were two people in villisca who were tied to the villisca crime. there were people who were murdered for the believe that they committed an isolated crime. but i don't think -- and there have been -- if i could be arrogant for a moment, there

have been people claiming that the person responsible for this series of crimes was a or b or c, but you cannot really take them seriously because they are not serious researchers and do not do the work to establish that they know what they are talking about. we were the first serious people to nominate somebody. brian: another tweet. "guys, relax. our president is not lazy. -- crazy, he just has a debilitating lack of self-awareness and has spent 60 years compensating for that i -- by trying to appear superman. when you phrase it that way it sounds crazy, but he's no crazier than napoleon or caesar or..." bill: like all good liberals, i

have a rather intense dislike of our president. however, i had a great respect for democracy. i didn't vote for him, but he was elected. he had an idea. he had a set of things he wanted to work on. he had a set of ideas that he put in front of the american people. those ideas won the election. that fact is entitled to respect, and i am always trying in my own way to lower the temperature a little bit and get people to work back toward the facts rather than, well -- you know as well as i do the media has been running around the past couple of weeks saying the president is crazy. it doesn't help our democracy to work well to be doing that. brian: you say in a 1914 "new republic" interview, "on politics we have made no progress at all.

people who are perceived as learned experts go on television to say stupid stuff and nobody says that is really stupid. don't you find that to be true?" bill: the explanations that politicians give for the phenomena that are happen -- not politicians, but the talking heads -- the explanations they give for phenomena are patently untrue in case after case left and right. i hate to pick on david brooks because he is a good one, but i remember in the example that always stuck with me, the 2008 democratic campaign. david brooks promised us that hillary would beat barack obama

because the democratic contest always comes down to someone who is favored by the educated public, the democratic college graduates, the democratic working-class, and the person favored by the working class always wins. it is such a stupid analysis that it is difficult to believe that anyone ever said that. i mean, if in baseball you offered a comparable analysis of why one team would win the world series, you would be laughed off the stage. it is true that baseball analysis in the 1960's and 1970's relied on generalizations

of that nature in which you take -- the problem with a generalization of that nature is you take seven or eight contests and draw a generalization about how they came out and then say that that generalization have to -- has to hold in all future contests. i find this to be generally true of all talking head analysis, and that is why i want to go back to "face the nation" interviewing the newsmaker rather than another journalist. i find the liberal analysis and conservative analysis of the facts to be filled with such obvious, silly generalizations that i can't comprehend why

people can't see through them. i thought about this for years. why aren't people able to see through generalizations of that nature? but we hear them everyday. brian: our guest has been bill james, who lives in lawrence, kansas, works for the boston red socks, and has a book, "the man from the train." thank you for joining us. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2018] ♪ announcer: for free transcripts or to give us your comments on this program, visit us at q-and-a.org. this program is also available

as a c-span podcast. >> if you like this q&a with author bill james, here are some others you will enjoy. sports writer john feinstein talks about his memoir one-on-one which chronicles his years of reporting on the greatest sports figures. book on the last crossing of the lusitania. and george will wright about the chicago cubs and the history of wrigley field and a nice little place on the north side are you can find these interviews online at c-span.org. >> here is a look at our live coverage today on c-span house and homeland security giving a speech on national security.

the house returned after that to consider bills dealing with military sales to jordan and combating russian cyber attacks. earlier this week, another temporary measure to keep the government funded past thursday. on c-span, former secretary of state hillary clinton walks -- talks about the role on women and human rights. .t 3:00, the senate returns a vote on the nomination at 530. on c-span3, a discussion on the current political climate and the impact it is having on the senate. also, the house administration committee meets to consider a resolution that would cry or each lawmaker and their staff to adopt and -- an anti-harassment and antidiscrimination policy. >>