Hey, this is Glenn Thrush, and welcome to Politico's off-message podcast, a special midweek edition with Dr. Ben Carson.

It has been a hell of a long month. This is the part of the cycle I personally hate every four years when the Republicans and Democrats finish up with the first four states, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and then we swing into this like dozens of states that we're going to see in the SEC primaries followed by Super Tuesday. It's a lot of ground to cover as a reporter,

but I don't know if some of you know this. Some of you may know. Some of you've read my tweets or

stories. I am a really bad flyer. And March is the time in a presidential campaign when the

candidates start doing these three and four state swings,

shooting around from state to state, and I really, really hate them.

We're talking about charter flights, where the pilots will fly through any kind of weather.

My usual remedy for this is a double gin and tonic, double tankery and tonic, to be specific.

And I'll take them even at 6 a.m. when I'm taking

a flight, but you can't really do three or four of those in the middle of a workday. So I'm thinking

maybe of renting a bus if Politico will pay for it like John Medden used to use to shuttle between

NFL games. Well, I'm not sure Dr. Carson is all that crazy about March either. He's really on the brink. And after a really

poor showing in South Carolina where he drew fewer votes than Jeb Bush, who dropped out, he is

starting to question whether or not he's going to stay in this race. And there are a lot of Republicans

who think he should drop out for the sake of the party. The interviewer about to hear took place

in Carson's hotel a few hours

before the voting in South Carolina ended. And I wanted to talk less about politics than about

race, something which is just sort of saturated in the soil of South Carolina and something

that Carson himself has been addressing in recent rallies. This was one of the hardest,

most frustrating, but also most interesting

interviews I've ever done. Carson has this odd habit of closing his eyes when you're asking him

a tough question and sort of trying to formulate the answer. And he told me at the beginning of

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