Podbit · Crime, Conspiracy, Cults and Murder
Taki was no innovator. At least 12 other South African serial predators used the exact same fake-job playbook. He found women who had no safety net, promised them the one thing they couldn't refuse, and took them somewhere no one could help them.
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At 38:00 · chapter starts 33:20
The mechanics of how Taki selected and groomed his victims are chillingly methodical. Most of his victims spoke isiZulu, a language he shared — women who would feel comfortable with a man who sounded like home. He introduced himself as someone with connections to legitimate, well-known companies: Hewlett-Packard, Nestlé, Ilovo, Toyota. The specificity of the company names made the offers credible, especially to women who had never navigated a formal hiring process. The next step was always money: a bribe to secure the position, or a first month's rent at company housing. Amounts ranged from R300 to R3,000 — roughly $40 to $430 — and for women earning little or nothing, that sum was significant. Some had to borrow from relatives; some families turned to loan sharks. Then came the trip, which Taki made together with his victim by minibus, sometimes even getting her to cover his fare. To anyone else on the bus, they looked completely ordinary.
Taki charged victims between R300 and R3,000 — roughly $40 to $430 USD — as fake 'bribe' or housing fees, with some families borrowing from loan sharks to pay.
Taki killed 13 women over roughly 7 months, from February to September 2007, averaging nearly one victim every 2.5 weeks.
More freedom doesn't produce more happiness — it produces more anxiety. Kierkegaard identified this 180 years ago: the more options you have, the more you feel the 'dizziness of freedom,' a paralytic unease at having to choose any single one. The freest generation in history is, by his prediction, exactly the most anxious.
Every person lives in constant tension between infinite possible selves and the finite, limited self they actually are. Tipping too far toward infinite possibility produces a loss of identity; too much confinement in the finite produces stagnation. Kierkegaard argued that this tension is never solved — only managed.
Standing outside a cold pool imagining reasons not to jump is the exact experience of pre-commitment anxiety. Once you jump, the shock passes and you wonder why you ever hesitated. The same mechanism governs every significant commitment in life — the dread is always on the outside, the relief on the inside.
Traditional societies had rites of passage that closed off childhood and opened adulthood. Modern society kept the in-between liminal phase but eliminated the ritual that resolved it. The result is 'emerging adulthood' — a decade or more stuck in the transition — engineered by rising education requirements, women entering the workforce, and delayed marriage.
When Mark Manson proposed to his wife, software he didn't know was running — the low-level assessment of sexual market value and other options — suddenly shut down. Commitment doesn't take freedom away. It trades optionality (freedom to do many things) for focus (freedom from distraction). John Dewey called these positive and negative freedom, and the latter is more powerful.
Mark Manson spent years as a location-independent digital nomad — always a new country, a new woman, a new venture. Then the diminishing returns kicked in: countries started feeling the same, dates felt identical, businesses all frustrated him. The cure wasn't more novelty. It was narrowing: one place, one person, one career.
Every meaningful commitment has a dip — an initial peak of excitement, a brutal trough of difficulty, and a second higher peak for those who push through. Institutions once kept people in the dip long enough to reach the other side. With infinite optionality and no institutions, everyone bails at the bottom and restarts the cycle of shallow first peaks.
Stage one — the aesthetic — is the default: chasing sensation, novelty, and keeping every door open. Stage two — the ethical — is learning to choose with eyes wide open, accepting the trade-offs. Stage three — the religious — is when a commitment becomes so total that it no longer feels like a choice. It just feels like who you are.
The ethical stage is rational commitment — you can explain your choices. The religious stage is when your commitment exceeds rational justification. You can't explain why. It just feels like it chose you. Kierkegaard called this the 'virtue of the absurd' — and it's represented not just in faith but in the entrepreneurs, artists, and athletes who can't imagine doing anything else.
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