Joshua (at left) and Givi.
THE STUDENTS SAT IN ROWS of chairs in a room with lime green and pale orange walls. They’d all arrived in Tsakhkadzor, and on the first night, were watching The Call of the Entrepreneur. Most watched the documentary intently. Instructors Glenn Cripe and Joshua Zader surveyed the students’ interest and asked questions. There were a few who passed notes, and one young man with thick black eyebrows dozed in a corner.
Throughout the week, Glenn, Andy Eyschen, Joshua, Jacek Spendel, and Thomas Kenworthy took turns presenting lectures on the history of classical liberal thought, how to create business plans, the proper role of government, and even transhumanism.
Givi Kupatadze, a Georgian, was one of the stars. A blonde-headed, blue-eyed romantic who wrote love poems in broken English, Givi didn’t necessarily set out to be a ladies’ man, but throughout the camp, the women flocked around him. It wasn’t just his handsome face that attracted the women. At 22, he was in talks with an agency to publish a book, he’d made presentations to the ex-minister of finance, and he’d created and was close to selling a customer program for grocery stores.
He was born into a family that lived through the Soviet times and had been affected heavily by the stifling atmosphere. Givi’s father watched the “successful people” rise in ranks of the mafia, and once commented cynically that there were only two ways to make it—by running guns or by becoming the “boss of the clan.” But his father did always preach, “If you want to be successful in life, it depends on you, and you must take good education.” And Givi never forgot that.
Givi earned a scholarship (which was nearly unheard of in Georgia, especially before the revolution in 2004) to study economics at Tbilisi State University. He attended conferences and made presentations on how to lower, and even eradicate, unemployment in Georgia. In 2008, he read a book by Jim Rohn called Seven Srategies for Wealth and Happiness, and decided to become an entrepreneur. “I want to improve people’s lives,” he says. “This is my passion in life.”
When he attended the first liberty camp in Georgia in 2010, things fell into place for Givi. Before, he’d always felt under obligation to help his friends and neighbors. After the camp, his thinking changed. “I realized that I own my life and no one has the right to make demands on my life,” he says. “And I have no right to make violations against others. It was amazing for me.”
Watching these kinds of realizations take place is exactly what drew Joshua Zader, one of the teachers, to the camps. “There’s something really fascinating about students who want to learn these principles,” he says. “They don’t have teachers around them who can teach them. They’re growing up in the shadows of communism. It’s empowering for everybody to learn.”
Joshua grew up in Cookeville, Tennessee, where he was an outcast because of his atheist beliefs and “hippie” tendencies. For most of his life, he says, he felt like an outsider. He shares a story similar to Glenn’s when it comes to discovering libertarian ideas. An older friend gave Joshua a copy of The Fountainhead for his 18th birthday. A few months later, he read it. “I was captivated from the very beginning,” he says. “I like books that portray an ideal and that portray something deeply, deeply good. I sensed Roark had high integrity, and that resonated with me really deeply.” He spent months reading everything he could about Ayn Rand. To him, she’s a “system builder” and “provided a framework for understanding ideas like existentialism.”
He became so obsessed, he didn’t know where he ended and she began. He stopped reading Rand for a decade and revisited her works in 2003. He started The Atlasphere, a dating site for admirers of Rand. After his friend Stephen Browne, one of the founders of LLI, told him about the liberty camps, Joshua decided to volunteer his time in Armenia as a teacher.
While his and Givi’s journeys to Tsakhkadzor were relatively painless, Manane’s was not.