THIS ISN’T THE 21st CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: Silicon Valley startup proudly starves its employees:

Employees at Nootrobox, a smart drug company which produces cognitive enhancers called nootropics, don’t eat from Monday night until Wednesday morning.

“We’re actually super-productive on Tuesdays,” co-founder and CEO Geoffrey Woo told The Mercury News. “It’s hard at first, but we literally adopted it as part of the company culture.”

Some of Woo’s colleagues are way more hardcore. “Some people don’t eat for even longer. They fast on Sunday night, then breakfast on Wednesday morning,” he told Inverse.

Many Silicon Valley workers are trying to “hack” their brains as they strive to gain an edge in the city’s ever-competitive market.

When a great idea can earn you millions of dollars — apps like Uber, Snapchat and Tinder once started as tiny ideas — there’s an extra incentive to have your brain always working at full capacity.

“It kind of sucks, in the beginning, to not eat for 36 hours,” Woo said. “But it’s fun to get breakfast together on Wednesday. We realized that a lot of people in our community want to do that as well, so we started a biohacker breakfast.

“We have 300 people in a Slack channel, nerding about fasting and different fasting protocols. Every Wednesday at 8 a.m. in San Francisco, we have a biohacker breakfast.”

I’m old enough to remember when Silicon Valley was run on junk food. You could stop by the San Jose Fry’s Electronics and buy circuits, diodes, and other electronic parts, a case of Coke, a bag of Doritos, a box of Twinkees or Ho-Hos, a copy of Penthouse Forum, and start hacking a project together. Plus, it’s just surreal that in a city like San Francisco crawling with armies of feral starving homeless people, a cult-like business wants its employees to deliberately starve. And good luck enforcing those rules after hours, fellas. (Perhaps it’s a “rolling fast” a la Cindy Sheehan and Sean Penn, circa 2006.)