Alongside a hard sell for age-reversal products, People Unlimited deals in a currency of community and positive affirmation. Even their notably tactile affection for one another feeds the mission—as one member put it, they literally hold on to one another without the fear of loss.

“It’s such a tremendous alleviation of stress to live this way,” Strole told me over the phone a week after the whirlwind that was RAADfest. Decades their junior, I was still recovering, but Strole and Bernadeane seemed unfazed. Maybe they’re born with it; or maybe it’s their latest regimen of personalized vitamin supplements, immune-boosters, piano playing, and sports-car driving.

In the RAADfest exhibition hall, a woman tests out the Rasha Morphogenetic Harmoniser System. The product purports to reverse mutations in “junk DNA.” The Nevada-based company offers “quantum self- healthcare” as an alternative to conventional Western medicine.

For the most serious devotees, immortality-seeking is a full-time commitment to keeping abreast of the latest innovations—they speak of these “modalities” with the same reverence a Christian would of a blessing. A $250 billion industry of antiaging products and services is there for the collection—and many of their offerings are for sale at RAADfest.

"I know it's gonna sound stupid, but I feel... metallic,” an Australian named Ray Palmer explained to me in the RAADfest exhibition hall. He was easing into his second hour hooked up to an IV coursing NAD+-replenishing fluid through his veins. The coenzyme’s depletion is linked to aging and aging-related disease—a study re-upping the stuff in mice was found to make them livelier, more youthful, and more muscular. There’s no clinical evidence of such effects in humans, but one thing’s for sure, said Palmer: “My thoughts are extremely profound. Since I’ve been sitting here I’ve written a book in my head about that plant over there.” People at RAADfest were lined up to try it out.

Rudi Hoffman, a 61-year-old cryonics life insurance salesman, climbs into an at-home hyperbaric chamber.

At the Stem Cell Institute booth of Neil Riordan, PhD, you could sign up for stem cell therapies delivered in Panama that, according to their purveyor, cured Mel Gibson’s father of liver and kidney failure. A poster boy for the clinic, Hutton Gibson was wheelchair-bound when he came in and walking a month later, Riordan told the audience. You could also arrange to be injected with the blood plasma of a teenager for around $8,000. You could stand on a vibrating platform that, according to its sales rep, gives “the most benefits ever.” You could lie between electronic currents and be whispered to by a nymph-like blond. You could buy pretty vaginal weights from a self-styled tantric master.

If this all fails, there’s the ultimate speculative investment: cryonic preservation, as used by Austin Powers. “Two hundred thousand dollars for the whole body, $80,000 for the head—that’s where your memories are; we should be able to rebuild the rest,” explained R. Michael Perry, who is a live-in employee at the Alcor cryonics facility in Scottsdale, where he helps watch over more than 160 preserved bodies. Another 1,200 are signed up to be put on ice and brought to the facility upon legal death, with most paying in advance via specialized life insurance policies. Bodies have been accumulating here since the 1970s, but none have been resurrected yet—the technology to do so doesn’t exist, and no one knows if it ever will.