♪ announcer: from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: jeff bezoscharlie: started amazon out of his garage as an online bookseller. today, it is among the world's most valuable companies and he is one of the world's richest people. to sellambition is everything to everyone. amazon web services is the leading company in the cloud. in january, amazon became the first digital streaming service to win a golden globe for best tv series. jeff bezos has many passions including finding the company

blue argent to lower the cost of safety.nd increase he purchased the washington post. i met with him earlier today at the economic club in new york. here is that conversation. what is it that amazon wants to be? there are a couple of answers to that. probably the biggest one, perhaps the best way to answer that question is that the thing that connects everything that oneon does is our number conviction and idea and philosophy and principle which is customer obsession as opposed to competitor obsession. and so, we are always focused on the customer working backwards from the customers needs and developing new skills internally so we can satisfy what we perceive to be future customer needs. we have a whole working backwards process that starts

with the customer needs and works backwards. that is really -- it seems like we are in a bunch of different businesses. we have amazon web services just completely different from our amazon prime business or amazon marketplace or amazon studios and so on but really, the way that those businesses are run is very similar. and it all starts with -- it is not just customer obsession, that is the number one one. but we have a very inventive culture. we like to pioneer in bench. there are other very effective business strategies and pioneering is not the only strategy. some would argue that it is not the most effective one. close following can be a very effective business strategy and it has worked many times it is just not who we are. willingness to think long-term. that is another common thread through every single

thing that we do. we are very happy to invest in new initiatives that are very which in 5-7 years most companies, they will not do that. companies will invest for very long periods of time where the outcomes are more certain. it is the commendation of the risk-taking and the long-term outlook that makes amazon special in a smaller crowd. pridenally, taking real in operational excellence. doing things well. finding defects and working backwards. incremental improvement that in business most successful companies are very good at this one. if you are not good at finding defects and finding the root causes of those defects and fixing the root cause, you never want to let defects float downstream. that is a key part of doing a good job in any business in my opinion. charlie: you still want to sell

everything to everybody. jeff: for sure. we started 20 years ago, selling only books. i was putting together all of the packages and driving them to the post office myself. i thought one day we could afford a forklift. [laughter] it is very different today. up time, added music and and when we send a message out to the customer base, 1000 randomly selected customers, the sides books, music, and video what did you want us to sell. an incredibly long list came back. couldstomer asked that we sell windshield wipers. a light went on in my head. people will want to use this newfangled e-commerce way of

shopping for everything. because people are very convenience motivated. started thely consumer into electronics and then of peril and so on. charlie: take apparel. macy's was the largest seller in the world. jeff: i have not tried to track that. back to not being competitor of test. apparel.lling a lot of and that team is doing a fantastic job. i do think that if we are not the largest, we are amongst the in the apparel sellers world and there is a lot of room. we keep improving. if you were to talk to our apparel team, they would tell you they don't think we are very

good at it yet and still the business is going very well. i am never disappointed when we are not good at something because i think -- think how well it will work when we are good at it. that.parel is like there is so much opportunity. no one knows how to do a great job of offering apparel online yet. we are working through our experimental list. charlie: amazon prime. amazon marketplace and amazon web services. now is theservices largest contributor to revenue it is said. jeff: not to revenue. it is a big contributor to profit. our retail business by the way in our established countries is also very profitable. we keep investing so we are investing in video, original

content with amazon studios but amazon web services is a remarkable thing for a couple of reasons. it follows on those principles that i laid out at the beginning but one of the most unusual things that happened with amazon web services is the amount of runway that we got which was a gift before we faced like-minded competition. empirical to me in that if you invent an new way of doing something, typically, if you are lucky, you get about two years of runway before your idea. copy and you years is actually a pretty long time in these industries so that is a big have dark. for whatever reason, and i have a hop hop assist about the reason but for whatever reason, amazon web services got seven years of runway before we faced like-minded competition. there were other people doing similar kinds of things but not the same way and not with the

same approach or mindset. and in my experience, that is unheard of to get so much runway. and i think the reason that that happened was because the andmbents in technology infrastructure for enterprises thought that what we were doing weird that itmn could never work. so we just kept very quiet about it. and we knew it was working and we would read news stories that would say things like that do you really think anyone is going ,o buy mission-critical enterprise infrastructure from an online bookseller? and we would look at that and certain people were opining on that we would read those articles and look at our business statements and say -- we are. [laughter] so we kind of knew. -- so we got very

lucky. that was a gift. what that allowed us to do was build a gigantic advantage in terms of the feature set and service offerings and the cost structure and everything else that you just cannot wave a magic wand and do that quickly. it takes years. and now, we are not stopping so year, 500-8 every hundred new features and services so they keep pushing on that. charlie: what is interesting to me is that you were doing it for yourself. the things you were doing for yourself and we thought -- if we are doing it for ourselves -- jeff: this is true. the founding idea behind amazon web services is that our applications engineers and our networking and data engineers were spending way too much time coordinating.

and so, the applications engineers were the ones that build the things that customers interact with, they drive the business forward and revenue. building data centers and putting servers in the data centers and building fleets of servers and getting right levels of capacity and making sure all of the operating versions are correct. putting databases on top of the service. all of the networking. this is unbelievably complicated and hard. as hard as it is to build the application layer. at any does not really value to the application layer. it is a kind of price of admission. it is one of those things that has to be done perfectly but it is not secret sauce. it will not change the way you run your business. do was toe wanted to reduce those fine-grained conversations at the applications engineers were having with the networking

engineers. and we said -- we should just and the set of api's teams can discuss the roadmap in in a coursers grained way the roadmap we should expose and it will simplify those conversations and give them a lot of stability and they will not have to do all of these silly fine-grained coordination conversations. and so we started designing that. the second we started writing it down, we said -- what we are building here is amazon.com needs these things but pretty soon, every thing -- everyone is going to need these things. with a little bit of extra work, we can turn what we were going to bill for ourselves into a service for the world and that is what we did. , a verys now successful, large -- charlie: the largest factor in

the crowd -- in the cloud by far. shippinghave a large contingent within your own operation. jeff: billions of packages in year. it takes a lot of logistics. charlie: you are getting into the shipping business. jeff: we have an a plus team. charlie: is it the same model? .eff: not quite it is a little bit different. here, we are really being driven by capacity needs especially if you look at the holidays selling season. the fact of the matter is that we need all of the capacity that establishedrom the transportation providers like the u.s. postal service and ups and we will take all of the capacity they can give us. i am just talking about the u.s. in the same story is playing out around the world. the royal mail and deutsche post

. in addition to that, we need more capacity especially at peak if we are to grow our business. we have been forced into developing expertise in the last mile. and of course, we do use it for our third-party business. third-party sellers can now use in their marketplace business, we offer a service where third-party sellers can put their inventory in our fulfillment centers and we handle all of the fulfillment and returns and customer service for them. , that logistics chain will work for us and for third-party sellers. and it is really crucial that we continue to build that out. charlie: fedex and ups need not worry. to bethose guys are going able to continue to grow and we will continue to grow with them and still need additional

capacity. charlie: the other thing is amazon prime. 65 million members. jeff: we don't reveal that. so i do not want to not to. nod.do not want to [laughter] charlie: amazon is reasonably secretive. reveale don't want to things that will help competitors. and it also is hard to figure out which things would help them. we got a bigger window, i was talking about our aws business and the long run weight that we had. if we had been out there bragging about our business, we would have attracted attention from incumbents budget sooner than what actually happened. and so, there is no reason in business usually to boast about your accomplishments. people will figure them out. boasting about the number of prime members will not make

anyone more likely to join prime in my opinion. people already know that a lot of people are prime members, their friends are prime members. it is true that in consumer businesses and in enterprise businesses, that people to some degree like to be with the leader and in the crowd and so you do want people to know that you are a leader and you want people to know that the offerings are successful and a lot of people are using them to you do not have to quantify that for consumers or enterprises. charlie: let us assume it is a large number. [laughter] why is it so crucial for your future, prime? -- what we want prime to be and what we have developed it into overtime is that it is the best of amazon. so, you can get -- a if you join

prime, we want to have our core service be outstanding and anyone who wants to use amazon and not be a prime member should have a great experience. primeople who are not members for example can still get free shipping. a certainto purchase number of products or get above a certain order basket hurdle come i think it is $49, and if they get above that hurdle, and they can get free shipping. and so, what we did with prime can get freek, you shipping without joining prime but if you want fast, free shipping, our best service, then you need to join prime. charlie: it is $99 a year. jeff: $99 a year. and then we added services like prime video. that has been a new successful benefit for prime. 10,000-20 thousand

shows and they were all licensed and reruns like "gilligan's island." and it was a kind of "by the way offering." here is a new benefit as a prime member. it is not the most important tv shows in the world but but it is also not costing you anything extra. and so a group. and now, we are doing emmy award-winning and global gold -- award-winning shows. you get access to that with no additional charge. charlie: getting into the greater part of the entertainment business, what was the motivation for that? jeff: we always start with the customer centric point of view. how can we -- if we are going to make a original content which amazon studios is doing, how can it be better or different from so much content that is out there that you can license

already and not have to make yourself? thatact of the matter is the over-the-top streaming services with the subscription model can in fact make different kinds of contact -- content. for example, a show like "transparent," is never going to be a show that is successfully done on broadcast tv because broadcast tv it is a much bigger audience for that. "transparent" -- we want to make someone's are favorite shows. and on broadcast tv, you can be buried happy if you have a big peoplest is 20 million third favorite show. you can think about the creative process differently and you can attract different storytellers and you can go for stories that are more narrow but incredibly powerfully well told. "mozart in the jungle."

i don't see how that can be successful on broadcast tv either. can attract a different kind of story teller that wants to tell a certain kind of story. and then there are tailwinds in this business that are happening because of netflix and others -- 10 years ago, you could not get an a list talent to do tv. they perceived it as stigmatized in. completely is inverted. today, a list talent wants to do serialized tv because the quality of the storytelling is so high. it has been flipped on its head. it benefit your traditional e-commerce businesses? the fact that you have a presence in business? am talking about the customer experience part of -- you want storytellers with guts

and taste to do something with someone's favorite show. then, let us talk about the business side of that. these shows are expensive. " which isigh castle one of our highest rated shows and you should see it if you n worldt -- hitler' wo war ii ended his 1962 and the not seize control the east coast . it is creepy. [laughter] that show is super expensive to make. how do you pay for that content? that is the business side of that. the business side is unique to amazon. there is another model out there like that. whecome a prime member, you buy more from us. now thato yourself -- i have paid my 99 dollars here, how else can i use that membership? when people join prime, they buy

more shoes, dishwashing detergent, diapers, books, electronics, toys and so on. and so we really want people to join prime and we really want people to renew their prime membership and so, when we make -- when we win a glow -- golden globe, it is for us what we are tying that too, and we can see that in the metrics, that people who use private video are more likely to convert from free trial to pay prime members and they are more likely to convert members theree next time, not to convert but to renew for a subsequent year. that is what closes the loop on the business side. you don't do things for the business reasons. you need to do things for the butomer experience recent

you need to know how you're going to pay for that customer experience. you need to close the loop on the business side. charlie: i have listed three pillars. what might the fourth pillar be? jeff: we do not know yet is the answer. we do a lot of different things. rise andh pillar will distinguished itself. we will put energy into many things. i am optimistic about things like amazon studios, the original content -- that could become a fourth pillar on its own. and i think what we are doing with national language understanding and echo and alexa -- charlie: everyone talks about artificial intelligence. jeff: and rightly so. ♪

♪ jeff: this is the real thing. charlie: enlarge on that as well as the idea of what echo is and how it may well be the beginning of the wedge into artificial intelligence that benefits everyone. is a small, black cylinder that has seven microphones on the top and is eager inside and a digital processor and some other computer inside. it is wi-fi connected to the cloud. and alexa, the artificial

intelligent agent that lives in the cloud can talk you through echo. and one of the interesting things about echo the device is that it uses the seven microphones to do something called -- beam forming. they can hear you very well even in a loud kitchen environment with the dishwasher running and the sink running water and someone may be playing the television set in the living room and alexa can still hear you because of that digital processing. and you can say -- alexa, what time is it? what is the weather? in natural language. -- this has been a big hit. we launched it a few years ago. it has vastly exceeded our expectations in terms of volume. we have literally thousands of people dedicated to working on it. charlie: and google wants to be

in that business. jeff: and here we have the standard 2.5 year head start. charlie: let us talk about the "washington post." you did it without due diligence. graham forse i knew 15 years. if any of you know him, he is possibly the most honorable person in the world. he laid out all of the words -- as theor me as well great things about the post and no amount of due diligence could have gotten me more clarity and just talking to don for several hours. charlie: why did you buy? jeff: because it is important to me. the washington post is important. it makes sense to me to take

something like that. optimistic.o i thought there were some ways -- i want it to be a self this profitable enterprise that will be healthy. and i think it can be done. our approach is very simple. to execute on and it will take time but the approach is simple -- we need to go from making relatively large amount a money her reader, on relatively small number of readers. that is the historic model. of money small and not per reader on a large number of readers, that is the new model. charlie: that is also your business model, isn't it? jeff: it is a better business model for the internet era. this is is unusual and why i am so optimistic is that it can go from dust it has

historically been a very good local paper but it happens to be a local paper situated in the capital city of the united. and so, it has a geographic location that is superb for converting it from a local paper to a national and even a global publication. and that is a gift that the internet brings. to do national and global publication in the days of print is super expensive. have to figure out how to have printing presses everywhere and physical distribution everywhere. very challenging. today, that peace is easy. to get global distribution is extraordinarily simple. charlie: because it is an important newspaper, did you want it also because it would give you political influence? jeff: no. [laughter] when of the reasons why donald wasam liked me as an owner because he did not think i would politicize it.

and i think because it is in the capital city of the united states of america, it should not -- take the british model of or at the left-wing paper or right-wing paper. there are certain people that had they purchased the washington post would have converted it in one of those directions and i do not think that would be healthy for the post or the country. i am alsohat respect, a good owner because i am so damn busy. e orve no desire to meddl opine on everything. i have no time to be in the newsroom every day or even for the editorial pages. and, by the way, it is a very difficult business that needs to be done by professionals.

i sometimes get asked -- do you opine in the newsroom or get involved in newsroom activities? as i do now a little bit about newsrooms, it would be exactly the equivalent of me walking into a surgical leader while my son was having brain surgery and meddling with the brain surgeon. it does not make sense. being the executive director of the post, and we have the best in the world, he is and his team are doing an unbelievably good job. back to -- talking about the business model of the post and transitioning to a new model. the real reason this can work is because the post is creating riveting coverage and they are doing it. they are. you cannot turn around the restaurant with business

techniques if the food is not delicious. -- the post is riveting. they are killing it. charlie: i am so proud of that team. people in my profession are great admirers of what the washington post is today under marty behrens' leadership. jeff: he would be the first to tell you that it is his team. he has put them in place and given them a lot of energy and they are proud of the product they are creating. -- iost also has a culture have no desire to change the culture of the post. that would be counterproductive. it is decades old. what you want to do with something like the post that has a very healthy decades-old culture is, instead of changing it, you want to uncover it, reveal it, and burnish it.

the more i have gotten to know about the post, is that the distinguishing feature is that the post has more swagger. they are swashbuckling. but they are professional swashbucklers which is very important because nonprofessional swashbuckling just get you killed. you cannot do that. they are just incredible. sat lastyou and i night with a former ambassador. whot kelly who was there was out at the international space station for many days. what is it you hope to accomplish in space? let as backup, this is a childhood dream. i fell in love with the idea of space and space exploration, and travel when i was five years old. neil armstrong stepped

onto the moon. you don't choose your passions, your passions choose you. this idea.ected with i could not ever stop thinking about space. and thinking about it, ever since then. when i started blue origin which is the name of this space listny, i did not make a of all of the businesses in the world where i thought i might get the highest return on investment capital. [laughter] was driven by passion and curiosity and the need to explore the things that i care about. over time built a brilliant team of over 800 people at blue origin. we have a tourism vehicle called like apherd that flies regular rocket when launched and then lands on its tail like a buck rogers rocket. we have used the same vehicle

five times. charlie: and that is key to the business in going to space. jeff: absolutely key. when you ask the question of why is so expensive, it it is one reason -- we throw away the hardware after each use. it is expendable. the past, the semi-reusable inks, they were not operable reusability. ,hey were disassembled inspected, and put back together. you can imagine how expensive air travel would be if after vacation, they throw away the 747 but it also would be very expensive if once you are arrived, they disassemble the whole thing, inspect every part, and put it all back together before you can fly again. that was the problem with the spatial. it is really important that you design a vehicle from the beginning for highly operable

reusability. the propellants are incredibly low cost. people do not know this about rockets but a big rocket, let us say it has a million pounds of propellant on board. two thirds of that maybe liquid oxygen. do you know how much liquid oxygen costs? $.10 a pound. and then add the fuel cost in and you are still talking about a few hundred thousand dollars in propellant cost. and the launch costs on the -- hundred $50y million. you are throwing the hardware away. the engineering challenge involved in building a highly israble, reusable vehicle gigantic. but if you can do that, it would

be a game changer. and now, to your original question, why -- i believe it is incredibly important that we humans go out into space. the primary reason if you think long-term about this is that we need to do that to preserve the earth. i am not one of the plan be guys. plan b not one of the guys. it is quite common to think that one of the reasons we need to go to space and settle another planet would be as a backup for humanity. if earth is destroyed, at least we have this other place. approach --e that that is not motivating to me. just because i will tell you what we know for sure. we have now sent robotic probes to every planet in the solar system. we have taken close looks at them all and believe me, this is the best planet.

[laughter] it is not even close. so, what you need to do, and if growing,a thriving, civilization, you want the population growth to continue. and i believe that in the next few hundred years, what will happen is that we will move all heavy industry into space for a bunch of practical reasons. easier access to resources of all kinds, material resources and energy. if you think about solar energy on earth, it is inherently problematic because it is only available half of the time. in space, it is available 20 47. that there are practical reasons -- builde: you also have to an infrastructure of their. -- you also have to build an infrastructure up there.

blue origin is not going to do this all by ourselves. what i want to do with blue origin is to lower the costs of access to space so the next generation of entrepreneurs can have a dynamic explosion of entrepreneurialism in space. and ultimately, earth can be effectively rezoned as residential and light industrial. [laughter] charlie: unlike the internet, there was infrastructure there. tiny, littlewas a company started with four people. and we could just we built amazon because we did not have to do any of the heavy lifting. the transportation and the already existed. we did not have to build the internet.

it was run on long-distance cables it into the ground for long-distance phone calls. we did not have to build a payment system because the credit card system already existed. all of these things would have been hundreds of billions in capex and we got to rest on those. on the internet, two kids in a dorm room can change an industry completely. that in space. the price of admission is too high a cousin just getting to space is so expensive. old, lookingars back on my life, and the one thing i have done is make it so gigantice is a explosion of entrepreneurialism in space, i will be a happy man. charlie: last thing. you and bill gates got together and started a company. the idea is -- jeff: the science of that is unbelievable.

dnars shed little bits of into your bloodstream and you can use sequencing technology to amplify those things and detect cancers very early. for a lot of cancers, early detection is a big deal. this test the science of this is very promising and very real and it might not work. but it might and i am optimistic. and if it does work, it is a big deal. cap of: the market amazon has me do the second wealthiest person in the world, second to bill gates. can you imagine at some point in your life pursuing the kind of philanthropy that bill -- jeff: i was just talking about blue origin. we will see. [laughter] i did not choose blue origin -- what i am doing right

now is taking my amazon winnings and every time you see me sell stock in amazon, i have more money. charlie: i asked jeff last night museum,atural history he slapped me with a rude question. jeff: i do believe that blue origin can be a sustainable, profitable enterprise one day but that is an investment horizon that would make most reasonable investors sit to their stomach. solar are on track on our -- on new shepherd. i keep telling the team that it is not a race and we will do it when it is safe but we are on track for 2018. charlie: on behalf of everyone in this room, thank you. jeff: thank you, charlie.

♪

♪ the presidential nominees are entering the less the week of campaigning before america goes to the polls. for a sense of where things stand, bob costa joins me now from washington. thank you for doing this. let me begin with the question --does donald trump and his people see a pathway to victory on election day? with people inly

from tower, they acknowledge that privately. even donald trump technologists it sometimes publicly that it is difficult. when you look at pennsylvania, secretary clinton is well ahead. and in north carolina as well. in iowa, it is now very tight. what is really hurting donald that it just is that when they look at arizona where he is heading this weekend, georgia, and utah, where there is a large mormon population, those are states that republicans traditionally went and they are falling behind. best aboutthey feel is florida and ohio. swing states where they feel the working class voters in those states will come out in record numbers. anylie: do they have optimism because the polls may be in some cases tightening a little bit in his favor? bob: the thing they feel the most comfortable with is the

clock. if the election was held this week, he would likely lose. because there is a sense that he is in some way stabilizing his campaign after all of the cascading allegations of sexual assault, talking about sexual misconduct, he has been able to move away from those kinds of conversations in most of his interviews. he has gone back to mainstream news organizations this week. he has been focused on the economy and trade. he went to his hotel in talk about his business experience in a locate -- in a low-key way. he hasne conway feel turned the corner from the chaos. charlie: and stephen bannon thinks he can stroke the populism? based on evidence but a gut instinct. stephen bannon has been following the breitbart wing of the party for so many years.

he has fixated on donald trump as a brexit figure. coming outside of the partisan discussion in this country. a true populist nationalist. what you are seeing in the republican party is conversations about what the gop looks like -- will it be more populist nationalist looking forward. that abandoned wing is already nnon wing that ban will move forward. charlie: what about this new television company that will reflect the views of the people that have been his most intense supporters? bob: it is certainly possible and donald trump himself in a recent conversation denied it to me but there are conversations happening behind the scenes. the problem for people like stephen bannon is that to think through what it should look like

if they should lose is that the media environment has become so fragmented that the idea that donald trump could compete with fox or abc, cbs, nbc -- it does not make sense. if it is anything, it will look like what he has been doing this week which is facebook live, social media, having 40,000-100,000 people tuning to see himo stream talk. it is done on the cheap. a wayne's world operation. charlie: it is done at the same time as the evening networks. interestingly, it had the blessing of swords of the republican national committee. the chief strategist sean spicer appeared on the donald trump broadcast. this is the bannon model. he thinks targeted, aggressive media can have a wide influence

in this kind of fragmented environment. charlie: is obama care going to be an issue for donald trump in the remaining days of the campaign and can he make a strong case so that it will win him some voters? when donald trump talks about the affordable care act, it is like he is checking off a box on a to do list. he mentions it in his speech is that there is not a lot of verve . he is not consumed with the health care issue as he is with other issues. the people who have seized on the rise in premiums has been the down ballot republican candidates, those running for the house and the senate. trying to get traditional republican voters to come out in droves. even if they are wary of donald trump. they're talking about obama care because i think it is something that will get the suburban republicans out to vote. the other side is

hillary clinton. how do you see what she will do and try to do in the remaining days of the campaign? bob: it is about turn out for her. when they look at the map, clinton surrogates feel great. they feel the map is for a verbal to her and demographics are moving in her direction but she has to get close or near the level that president obama had in 2012. up to minority votes those kinds of levels. that is the one vulnerability that she has. in a place like pennsylvania, philadelphia -- aliens of voters, heavily democratic that are very african-american. that could be something that turns the election. it is about getting the first lady out there like she was on thursday talking to voters and trying to get millennials excited and minority voters excited. charlie: do they expect more to

come out with the wikileaks exposures? every day,ms like when you wake up you check wikileaks and you wonder what will be there because it is not a week story but an every day story. thereis a buzz about --is something really big, a smoking gun? but at this point, based on my reporting, there is no real sense that there will be something that changes the whole election at this point but you never know. it is unpredictable. charlie: looking at the senate, where do you think the vote would be if it was today? bob: senate majority leader charles schumer from new york. if you look at that tumor, he has done well against katy mcginty. he won in 2010 but that was a year that was favorable to republicans. heavily hot is struggling in new

hampshire. richard burr in north carolina. that are thenators establishment. they are struggling. portman in ohio looks safe to win and he has run the model campaign. he started early. he recognized that he need to get -- he needed to get on top of the populism. charlie: and the house? they need a turnover of 30 house members in order for there to be a change in the speaker. bob: i think the house is the most fascinating, underreported part of this election. charlie: i do also. about who not just wins the majority. you have a freedom caucus, 30-50 members who do not want to vote for anything. ryan does not just need the majority, he needs a solid majority ticky power. if ryan loses 20-30 seats and

his majority is narrow, he does not have much power. he will have to get democratic votes on everything. the big buzz in washington is if the house --if ryan only has a narrow majority, does he run for speaker? will he want to be speaker in that kind of situation? charlie: it drove john bader out of the speakership. -- it drove john boehner out of the speakership. is an extraordinarily difficult job. termshaos on the right in of activists and the institutional party collapsing, that continues, win or lose for donald trump. charlie: are we looking for the two candidates to simply make their way to the election day? that nothing dramatic will happen. asrogates will be out there

michelle obama was with hillary clinton in north carolina. at a sense,ng unless something dramatic happens, will simply stay on the course it is on. bob: yes, i think that is right. it has been a quiet week. there was the affordable care act news and we did have different battles each day but the candidates are spending most days going to a couple of rallies each day talking to voters. they have stopped fund-raising for the most part. it is all about turnout. the one thing everyone is paying attention to in this newsroom and elsewhere is donald trump's questions about the legitimacy of the election. there is a lot of talk on the right about vote monitoring and pull watching. the donald trump campaign tells me they have an operation in place to make sure it is legal in age state to make sure they are not being interfered with.

this has each campaign on edge. how will the trump campaign handle election day and will he recognized a loss if he loses? on his: any change position in that? it in ais taking lighthearted way. if you look at his comments on thursday on the campaign trail -- he said that maybe they should just give the election to him. he is joking. this is typical for donald trump. not a five page headline. but he seems to be entertaining the idea that this is going to be a rigged election. he does it day by day and it is riling up his base. that there may be some kind of manipulation. ♪

[captioning made possible by bloomberg television] john: i'm john heilemann. mark: and i'm mark halperin. with all due respect to james comey, really? ♪ once again it's friday and once again as if on cue this presidential race has been rocked by another m. night shyamanlan, head-scratching plot twist. we are of course talk by the