Jack Westin MCAT Podcast

MCAT registration opens this week, and for 2027 there’s a big change: every test date opens at once. Here’s how to get the date you want, and what to do if you don’t. In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly start a new chapter on strategy with a full walkthrough of MCAT registration. Both hosts have been through the process themselves, including a booking site crash, a scra...

A congressman covers his microphone and whispers, “Say yes.” What does that moment have to do with the main idea of an MCAT CARS passage? In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT CARS Podcast, Hunter and Molly work through the Economists and Politicians passage from October 15th. Economics and politics are two of the topics students dislike most in CARS, and the passage is a good case study in a tr...

The AAMC released 166 new CARS questions across 27 passages. The whole team did the material over a weekend, ran the numbers, and compared notes. Here’s what changed, what didn’t, and how to adjust your strategy. In this special crossover episode of the Jack Westin MCAT CARS Podcast, Molly and Hunter are joined by Mike from the MCAT podcast to debrief the new AAMC CARS Question Bank. They compare...

You’re basically a tube. Everything inside your digestive tract is technically still outside your body, and your cells only get what makes it across the lining. In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly walk through the digestive system from mouth to anus. They cover where digestion happens, where absorption happens, and how the accessory organs and hormones coordinate the pr...

Your innate immune system handles 99% of threats without you noticing. But when it's not enough, your body builds a custom-made response, one specific enough to remember an exact enemy for years. In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly continue their immunology series with the adaptive immune system: the slower, highly specific branch of immunity that brings memory, pre...

Witches, football, legal systems, grammar, motion in physics… what do any of these have to do with morality? Everything, if you're a philosopher trying to make the same argument five different ways. In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT CARS Podcast, Hunter and Molly tackle a philosophy passage on moral relativism, a topic that might make some CARS students groan, but turns out to be a genui...

99% of the pathogens trying to infect you right now are stopped before you ever feel sick. You just never notice, because it's working. In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly kick off their immune system series with the innate immune system, the fast, nonspecific defense network that handles nearly every infection before it ever becomes a "sickness." After sp...

A 9,300-year-old skeleton. A magazine headline calling it an "invasion." A scientific debate that became a political battleground. How do you read a CARS passage where every paragraph is fighting over who gets to tell the story of the past? In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT CARS Podcast, Hunter and Molly break down the Kennewick Man passage, a dense, multi-layered piece about archa...

A virus isn't even alive. It's just genetic material in a protein coat. So how does something that basic manage to take over an entire cell?   In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly tackle viruses, the topic their last two episodes on cellular trafficking were quietly building toward. Now that the mechanisms for moving things in and out of a cell are established, t...

Were Neanderthals hunted to extinction, or did they simply become us? A special guest returns to help break down one of the most fascinating CARS passages yet. In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT CARS Podcast, Molly is joined by a returning co-host, Jack Westin himself, for a passage on the Vindija Neanderthals. It's a passage built around a genuine scientific dichotomy: the "common p...

Vesicles don't just float where they need to go. They're driven there, on tracks, by literal motor proteins. Here's how that actually works. In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly finish their cell trafficking series by answering the question the secretory pathway episode left open: how do vesicles actually move through the cell? The answer involves microtubule...

A protein has no idea where it's going. So how does it end up exactly where it needs to be, inside the nucleus, in the mitochondria, or shipped out of the cell entirely? In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly pick up where cell biology left off. After breaking down individual organelles in the last episode, they now tackle the mechanism that connects them all: the endo...

Sealed cans, mysteriously empty. A puddle that appears out of nowhere. What does any of this have to do with land ownership? Everything. In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT CARS Podcast, Hunter and Molly break down a passage that starts like a supernatural mystery and ends as a sharp political and philosophical argument about land, ownership, and Indigenous belief in Papua New Guinea. They mod...

Are you more bacteria than human? The answer might surprise you, and it's just the beginning of this deep dive into cell biology. In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly go inside the cell. After covering membrane transport last episode, they now unpack everything happening on the other side of that membrane, from the nucleus outward into membrane bound organelles like...

Can history replace literature as the way we tell the human story? A 1980s essay makes the case, and it's more entertaining than you'd expect. In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT CARS Podcast, Hunter and Molly tackle a passage on history and literature, one of the topics students often dread, and prove it can actually be a blast to work through. They break down the full passage sentenc...

Can a cell control what gets in and what stays out? Here's how membrane transport actually works. In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly break down one of the most tested concepts on the exam: how molecules move across the cell membrane. Building on last episode's dive into lipids, they explore what makes a membrane selectively permeable and why that matters for me...

Welcome back to the Jack Westin CARS Podcast with Hunter and Molly! In this episode we walk through the August 12th daily CARS passage titled Television and Life, from Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, a media criticism passage about how television has stopped being just entertainment and quietly become the invisible architecture of modern culture. Fair warning: if you spend any time...

Welcome back to the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast with Mike and Molly! Last episode was DNA techniques. This episode we finally give some love to the most underappreciated of the four macromolecules: lipids. Lipids do not get the same attention as proteins or carbohydrates on the MCAT, but Mike makes a strong argument in this episode that lipids are actually the macromolecule that defines the cell. Wit...

Welcome back to the Jack Westin CARS Podcast with Hunter and Molly! In this episode we walk through the August 5th daily CARS passage titled Man the Hunter, an anthropology passage about whether early humans were primarily hunters or scavengers, and what the fossil evidence from Olduvai Gorge actually suggests. This is a great representative CARS passage: medium density, a clear competing theory s...

Welcome back to the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast with Mike and Molly! Last episode we covered DNA and RNA structure. Now we put that knowledge to work and answer the question that follows naturally: how do scientists actually study DNA, and how does the MCAT test those techniques? This is the DNA techniques episode, and it connects back to nearly everything you have already learned including amino aci...

Welcome back to the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast with Mike and Molly! Last episode was hemoglobin. This episode we zoom out even further and ask the question that underlies everything: what is the blueprint that tells your cells what to make in the first place? This is the DNA and RNA episode. And yes, it connects to basically everything you have already studied. 🎧 Next episode: DNA analytical techni...

Welcome back to the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast with Mike and Molly! This episode is unlike any other we have done. We are focusing on just one protein. Hemoglobin is arguably the most important protein on the entire exam, and the reason is simple: it touches everything. Amino acids, protein structure, acid-base chemistry, electrostatics, metabolism, spectroscopy, gel electrophoresis, chromatography,...

Mass spectrometry and ¹H NMR can look intimidating but the MCAT does not expect you to approach them like a full organic chemistry lab exam. In this episode of the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast, Mike and Molly break down the essential concepts you need to interpret mass spectra and proton NMR questions confidently. You’ll learn how to focus on the information that actually matters, eliminate incorrect...

Welcome back to the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast with Mike and Molly! Last episode we laid the foundation with absorption, emission and the electromagnetic spectrum. Now we finally get to use all of that to actually identify molecules. This is the episode most students dread. Spectroscopy diagrams, wave numbers, peaks, and graphs that look like complete gibberish. Mike and Molly break it all down so i...

Welcome back to the Jack Westin MCAT Podcast with Mike and Molly! We just finished chromatography and separation techniques. Before we dive into spectroscopy, there is foundational science that makes all of it make sense: how atoms absorb and emit light, why energy levels are quantized, and why some molecules are colored while others are not. This episode is the one most students skip and then reg...