MICRODOSE #1: What’s Next for Kim Kardashian’s Brain?
The Kardashian-Jenners are among the most prominent harbingers of negative social impact, and they have frequently used reality TV to perpetuate it.
MICRODOSE is where I think out loud. Twice a month or more, I’ll share pop culture riffs, cultural wellness observations, and other content—such as product reviews—that doesn’t fit the main newsletter.
The first piece is free; after that, MICRODOSE lives behind a monthly subscription priced about the same as a cup of coffee.
Back in November, on a particularly hodgepodge episode of “The Kardashians,” Kim, dressed in a fur-trimmed black top, black leather pants, and heels, sat in the posh offices of Dr. Daniel Amen, a popular celebrity doctor, looking at rainbow-colored SPECT images of her brain.
“You have a beautiful brain,” he said—a remark Kardashian met with a smile, and a quip in her confessionals. Then, in a gripping turn, Dr. Amen said that same allure had “holes.”
“The front part of your brain is less active than it should be,” he continued. “With your frontal lobes, as they work now, it would be harder to manage stress, and that’s not good for you, especially as you’re studying and you’re getting ready to take the [bar].”
I’ve been thinking about this since I saw the clips on TikTok right after Thanksgiving. First, because Dr. Amen is a quack and not enough people seem to acknowledge that, considering his many prominent podcast appearances. I suppose it isn’t shocking then that there’s no conclusive evidence linking stress to “holes”—or, to be more accurate, reduced blood flow—in the brain, just like there’s no concrete scientific backing that SPECT images even work as diagnostic tools. Second, the decision to air this moment on “The Kardashians” raises a fairly straightforward question as a longtime observer of wellness in popular culture: What is this teeing up?
In 2023, she was gifted a 3D model of her brain after getting an MRI from and partnering with Prenuvo. Perhaps, most critical here, is that she holds status among the billionaires for whom biohacking the brain is already a pet project.
The Kardashian-Jenners are among the most prominent harbingers of negative social impact, and they have frequently used their hyper-curated reality show to perpetuate it. Take the X-ray Kim had of her butt to prove it was “real,” a product of exercise and diet, and not implants or a BBL. By presenting her body as natural and attainable, she helped normalize a beauty standard that is physically impossible for most people to achieve. However, the idea that it was possible if someone worked hard enough in the gym and ate significantly less cascaded through pop culture, contributing to a generation of women who have internalized distorted social media expectations about their own bodies and blame themselves for failing to achieve them.
A similar dynamic emerged around Kylie Jenner’s foray into facial enhancements, which were initially denied as being the result of cosmetic intervention. When she later acknowledged that she had gotten filler, she reinforced the Kardashian-Jenner family’s weirdly performative transparency. (She had lip kits to sell, but more on that later.) We’re seeing a similar effect right now with Kris Jenner’s (incredible) facelift, and how it’s sending middle-aged women scouring Beverly Hills and the Upper East Side for a doctor who can provide an equally convincing deep-plane.
I’m not anti-plastic surgery; I don’t think it matters if I was, and no one owes us disclosure about the work they’ve had done. That feels worth saying. But the Kardashian-Jenner family has a habit of intentionally misguiding the public about their surgical enhancements. Then they exploit the dishonesty as a way to sell women products that promise to make them look like a Kardashian-Jenner. This becomes even more concerning when considered alongside the rise of billionaire-funded biohacking and optimization technologies that frame any human shortcoming as a problem to be fixed.
Back to Kim’s SPECT scan. Her interest in analyzing and improving her brain activity levels reads less like a personal wellness endeavor to me and more like an insidious prelude to an endorsement of high-level technologies designed to “optimize” human beings. I feel this way not only because she and her family are omens of the somethingshittyisabouttohappensocially, but because she’s promoted brain optimization before. In 2023, she was gifted a 3D model of her brain after getting an MRI from and partnering with Prenuvo. Perhaps, most critical here, is that she holds status among the billionaires for whom biohacking the brain is already a pet project.
Billionaire-funded companies such as Synchron1, Merge Labs2, Precision Neuroscience, Neuralink, and other brain-computer interface (BCI) companies3 often present these invasive technologies as progress, understandable given their publicly stated goals. At their best, these techs aspire to help restore cognition or ease symptoms of various neurological disorders. At their most concerning, they’re positioned as commercial biohacking products in the same vein as an Oura ring. For all users, there are ethical concerns regarding consent, data privacy, and unknown potential long-term harms. Neuralink’s research, for example, isn’t readily accessible, and the clinical trial brochure doesn’t really tell us anything. And for people who may want to take their personal biohacking to the next level, the law hasn’t caught up to provide protections for non-medical use.4
Dig Deeper:
The ethical implications of Elon Musk’s unorthodox approach to medical science
The Advancements and Ethical Concerns of Neuralink
The Ethical and Responsible Development and Application of Advanced Brain Machine Interfaces
I’m pointing out Neuralink specifically because it’s the most visible BCI. It’s also an Elon Musk-funded endeavor, and he wants to mass-produce the company’s chip this year. Kim has many social connections with other tech moguls, but there appears to be a working relationship with Musk, which is most thoroughly parsed out by writer Louis Pisano. In early 2025, Pisano questioned the extent of this connection following the official release of viral photos Kim took with Tesla’s Cybertruck and Optimus robot.
“Alleged undisclosed ad aside, the Cybertruck, with its futuristic design, was a perfect match for Kim’s carefully cultivated image of high-tech luxury and innovation,” writes Pisano of Kardashian’s paparrazi-glitzed adoption of Tesla in 2024. “At the same time, it marked a shift in how she aligned herself with companies, demonstrating that her personal brand was beginning to intertwine more visibly with tech and sustainable industries.”
Maybe the Kardashian-Jenners won’t help usher in the broader acceptance of BCIs, but our sociopolitical landscape and their public history have made it possible to wonder if they might. Right now, there’s increased conservative messaging suggesting that individuals should perform better rather than demand structural change. Then, there’s the groundwork that has been laid by both the Kardashian-Jenner tendency to turn their performative transparency into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise and the rise of increasingly unattainable biohacking tools. Kylie Jenner used the controversy around her lip filler to sell millions of lip kits to young people and launch Kylie Cosmetics. Khloe Kardashian aligned her “revenge body” with the launch of Good American. And, of course, there’s the resounding success of SKIMS, which sells Kim’s aspirational body type in addition to the shapewear.
Any convergence of celebrity influence, extreme wealth, conservatism, techno-solutionism, and capitalism risks deepening existing societal issues. This medley of forces will continue to normalize the conservative and neoliberal idea that constant self-improvement—whatever that may mean at any given time—is the only solution to whatever ailment, real or believed, is plaguing someone. As the cost of everything continues to rise, chasing these ideals will only be accessible to those who can afford them, while remaining highly coveted by everyone else.
So, sure, you likely won’t be able to afford any impending brain optimization technologies. But maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll win one in an Instagram giveaway.
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Backed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.
Backed by Sam Altman.
Kernel, backed by Bryan Johnson, Super Biohacker. Blackrock Neurotech, backed by Peter Thiel. CTRL-labs, backed by Mark Zuckerberg.
I should level set, re: biohacking. You may not know a biohacker—congratulations—but it’s a relatively large and niche community. There are no official numbers, of course, but to give you an idea, the Reddit community has more than 703,000 members.