yeah hello welcome it's oh thank you I haven't done anything yet but it's really pity that we only have such a small room so who am I I live in Göttingen in Germany I co-founded Zenit like in 1996 first Samba patches from 1994 porting Samba at that time to a next workstation and I am a very early somebody member Jeremy says third fourth whatever I don't know yeah possibly I mostly work on Samba infrastructure TDB TVN file server I'm one of the authors of the clustered file server that is being utilized in large storage environments and I have my hands in windbind which I'm gonna talk about here the active directory domain controller that's the colleague Stefan Metzmacher he has initially implemented the multi-master application protocol just by looking at what's going on on the wire before we had documentation in fact it was his bachelor thesis I believe to implement the DRS UAPI protocol and so he's the he's our expert on active directory yeah whatever so what is it this talk is to being a bit of a high-level overview of what active directory and Samba authentication is and in particular it I try to get you a picture of who to assume who can talk to whom who can answer what questions and so on what tasks are involved to get a Samba user authenticated and why the different aspects are important and so on quick overview what is active directory really it's Microsoft's central user database since like Windows 2000 before that Microsoft had a anti for a Windows nt4 which is a was a flat user database just a list of users you had a GUI limit of like 40,000 users in a single database and even at that it was very clumsy to use but yeah it worked they moved that to an adab database and they also put in Kerberos as an authentication protocol as a standard authentication protocol this adab database is multi master replicated and as always you have problems with multi master replication they for all the conflicts that can come can arise they have strategies to to mitigate that based on whatever kind of conflict what attribute this is on for example I believe on passwords it's last writer wins if you remove a directory somewhere a sub in OU somewhere and move something into that OU on another domain controller for each of these cases active directory has strategies to work around that and it's well understood these days the adab is highly specific and this is what I was talking about but this was my comment in the last talk they have very custom extensions and that are partly to accommodate huge directories that are not really covered well by some aspect of the adab standard they have a lot of internal magic in their implementation to make sure the internal schema requirements and all non schema requirements and are are actually met and always valid also active directory as used to be is a challenge response based authentication server and even in the world of Kerberos this is still very important for reasons I will point out of course it's also a DNS and they went to standards for doing domain controller lookup and yeah one aspect that is in practice relevant is that when you go to customers it's you will always or you will very often find very complex multi domain setups that have all sorts of trust in between I guess the our friends friends can tell stories about this people do all sorts of multi domain setups and active directory is made to cope with that better or worse but it's in if you go to a university it's very common to only have one single realm but if you go to active directory I mean dozens of domains or hundreds of domains is not really uncommon so what is Samba started in the 90s as a compatible file server to deck path works it used to be based on Solaris at that time that has long gone it's an implementation of many Microsoft protocols it started as all as server message block which is a pure file server protocol with some printing extensions based on that Microsoft that has added many other protocols in particular they have taken the distributed computing environments RPC implementation and extended that big ways Samba is a file is a print server using DC RPC it's a RPC server for user database services and this is essentially what is the anti for compatible domain controller then as I said we have Kerberos servers we have a DNS server we have an ad up server and so on DNS of course is always is again not invented here but yeah bind is also kind of a moving target when you want to hook into it and there's so many DNS servers and in the end for the requirements that we have DNS is not really a complicated protocol to implement we have been an anti for compatible domain controller what we call nowadays classic domain controller still works for ages with Samba for we became an active directory domain controller and what we have been for a very long time is an active directory domain member because what you see is normally companies customers have the active directory and they want to just have Samba or Linux workstations join that active directory and be normal participants in that authentication realm what is authentication what is authorization we have to distinguish between those two authentication is mainly to identify users did the user type in the password correctly is the user really the one who he or she claims to be the second question is authorization what is the user allowed to do and how does active directory specify what a user is allowed to do it's mainly by listing groups a user is member of and this is what we call the access token and we have to distinguish those two questions and I will talk about both extra aspects in the next few slides let's talk about general authentication mechanisms tenant FTP well everybody knows it not spending much time here the main advantage is which distinguishes it from all the other ones is you don't need plain text passwords on disk of the server in particular challenge response and Kerberos they require plain text password or the equivalent of those on the service disks on the yeah on the authentication service disks so the authentication server can always impersonate a Unix machine with the ETC shadow can't impersonate the user against other machines and this is where SSH fits in they authenticate the server by public key and then pass on the password and plain text and it doesn't matter it's not bad anymore so we have essentially plain on plain text on net but encrypted on disk then we have plain text on net encrypted or safe sealed by by public key and then we have all sorts of challenge response schemes and active directory uses these two Kerberos I mean I always have to think very hard to make sure that Kerberos is actually safe but my take from it is really it's a complicated version of challenge response okay NTLM versus Kerberos who has heard the NTLM acronym or so it's the NT LAN manager challenge response authentication protocol favor challenge response authentication protocol really abbreviates to crap on the other hand recent versions are not really as bad as they used to be I mean the initial versions coming from OS to for example they were really really crap even at that time but they are they are actually quite good these days if you go to latest NTLM V2 with with all the added nonces and all the exchanges they are they are usable of course you will always find enterprises where they where they are banned but everybody still are at 99% of the customers I meet still have that enabled and they are not regularly attacked by flaws in that there's a downside to this NTLM thing and we will talk about the different roles in a minute for every single authentication event anybody trying to authenticate needs to ask a domain controller and that's pretty pretty high load on the domain controller depending on the kind of authentication you have just guess HTTP for example very short request and you have to catch something somewhere then we have Kerberos it's the standard authentication protocol the main distinguishing factor is we have lifetime of tickets meaning somebody can authenticate and get some signed binary blob token that verifies to somebody else hey Folklendike has authenticated correctly that's the main thing of Kerberos and this means greatly reduced load on the domain controller due to this cashing the main downside is it's extremely picky so I don't even want to start I mean the time synchronization is mainly is basically solved but that's that's number one the other one that I frequently meet is you have to contact the server under its name you can't just contact an IP address it doesn't work because you don't find the service principle in the KDC database and if you DNS is broken if you have C names if you're have local ETC host Kerberos just doesn't work and so this is one of the takeaways that you should really take out of this call a talk here NTLM as a crap fallback must always be available otherwise you will have very very unhappy users eventually and they have broken Kerberos and they think that everything works but in fact the reason experience from the field Alexander's comment was many companies don't know that they are still using NTLM and they have broken Kerberos for some reason I mean it can all be fixed but it can be broke it is often very often it's broken yeah and every single breakage needs to be analyzed so roles in authentication we have a user hey I want to access this box I know a password I have a certificate I have something then I have my workstation or a server this server usually doesn't have a user database local that's the whole point of having authentication service somewhere and then we have a domain controller in KDC in in Kerberos speak it's a key distribution center we have domain controller and those guys are the point of trust they have all the users they are the gatekeepers for access control decisions and the point I want to make here which is very very important is these guys here need to trust these guys because the KDC can tell the work stations or servers that for calendic is rude or administrator or whatever so there must be some level of trust between those two and this trust must be cryptographically assured so how does how is it done H workstation on each server has a shared secret with with the DC and so when a workstation wants to authenticate for calendic the DC must prove it knows the secret so the domain not only for calendic authenticates itself against the workstation but also the domain controller authenticates itself against the workstation so that the workstation can eventually be sure yes for calendic was authenticated by the right domain controller Kerberos speak its principal service principle and key tab where they have to agree so same inactive directory enter some bovine bind it's a demon that we wrote a while ago I think was it Tim Potter who initially wrote it and it's a demon that essentially takes care of all this stuff that it was talking about it connects to domain controllers and it can be surprisingly complex to find the right domain controller for example you have actual directory sites and you need to be site aware so if I'm sitting in Europe I'm not talking to a better domain controller in Kazakhstan because I mean I have satellite links in Africa whatever and I don't want all my authentication go to Africa and back and this is what Microsoft has the concept of sites for they can tell me hey here's I have 25 domain controllers the three of those are local to you that's all done with server records and dns then what it does it connects to one of these domain controllers and establishes an encrypted channel authenticated an encrypted channel to that domain controller and much of this is really really nasty and you don't want to implement that yourself and this is all being taken care of by wind bind what it does also is it changes it machine its machine password regularly which can be surprisingly difficult given you have given that you have multiple domain controllers you change your password against one that domain controller dies or you change it against the domain controller the domain controller has accepted that change but then your local right to your disk fails and yeah that's that's yeah there are some aspects to take care of and this is all that windmine takes care of what windmine provides is an extremely simple interface and quoting simu it's just crap and too simple but it just has some fixed size requests and it works okay usernames can't be longer than 256 bytes that's one limitation here but who cares it's really extremely simple and we provide a library that wraps all the ugliness um for for anybody who wants to use it but it it just works and yeah it's it's it's one of the hidden secrets that nobody has to take care of nobody has to bother sumber provides payment and ss modules so it can authenticate users it can give you the illusion of active directory showing up in etc password and etc group and one very important aspect is it tries to simulate where it can what windows does and do nothing else but what windows does because that's all we can rely on anything we do that windows doesn't do in normal trial in normal operations can break we're not there yet but we're getting there okay authentication done by ntlm windmine can do ntlm windmine can also verify cover of tickets and so on and this is done what authorization what is the user allowed to do eventually that's permissions from access controllers in the file system in normal unit operations how do we evaluate eckles that's all based on user ids and group ids small 32 bit numbers how do we get there first we need to answer the question what's a user id and what group what's a user's uid and what group groups is he or she member of who knows it's domain controllers the question here is when do they tell us and active directory domain controllers and this is one of the big misunderstandings only ever tell us and they calculate the group memberships only when a successful authentication has done has been done so if a user presents his password either correctly either via kerberos or via ntlm that is the only moment when we can reasonably figure out what groups the user is in anything else is prone to break okay windmine entrusted domains windmine performing several tasks we do the authentication as i said we do the password checks windmine has authenticated the user and i said in the as i said in the last slide right we have gotten the token the list of groups the problem is in what format did we get these groups windows has a completely different notion of a user id essentially it's the 128 bit user id it's called security identifier it's this maybe some of you have seen this one s1532 slash 454 s1521 slash and then many numbers but at the bottom of it it's 128 bit uids unix can't deal with that i would love to make unix deal with 128 bit uids but it would solve us this topic here and i'm not going to talk about this topic because it would be like a two-hour talk in itself there are so many ways that windmine is able to map these 128 bit uids it gets from the active directory into the 32 bit uids space that is given to it by by linux so we have we can ask active directory for database lookups we can do it on our own we can whatever have script-based solutions and so on if you're implementing samba in an active directory this is a hot topic that definitely needs clarifying with customers and this is different for every single customer okay windmine also provides an SS information important question i said windmine connects to a domain controller establishes a trust and encrypted channel who can we establish this encrypted channel to and i said in one of the first slides it's extremely common to have very very very many domains cross realm trusts and windmine can only ever talk to its own realm slash domain so if user a from domain a user a from domain whatever one comes to windmine and windmine is member of domain b i would have a whiteboard would need a whiteboard now so windmine is member of domain a user from domain b comes to windmine hey please authenticate me windmine depends on the domain controllers to talk to each other to take over the inter-domain trust stuff windmine can only talk to its own domain because that's the only domain we have a workstation password for we have a shared secret for we can establish trust so right now this is the part where we're not there yet i said windmine wants to do all only what microsoft microsoft windows plans do right now by default we have code to list all trusted domains and to also contact other domain controllers although we really can't or we can't really depending on your point of view this worked fine in 84 times when the trust scenarios were a lot more simple a lot simpler active directory trust you don't another whatever 10 slides talk what kind of trust you can have and these are a lot more complex and and yeah the failure scenarios are much much more diverse and so windmine in 4.8 will have code to just drop this the problem is you have this code in windmine it does all this stuff and because the situations out there are so different you don't know what's exactly going to break when you just disable this and so what we do is we optionally say okay we don't do all this okay let's talk to the trusted domains and so on we just disable this optionally and ask people hey please disable this and and report failures because we can't really reasonably test all the scenarios that we we have to live in because i mean we can't set up 500 domains in whatever trust scenarios okay from this slide essentially this bullet point here is i i i told you much of this two points here active directory groups are hell complex in particular something that unix doesn't know really i mean for elder for pure elder we have data models for this but in plain unix etc password etc group there is no group nesting active directory has all sorts of group nesting and sambar as a pure client has no way to follow all this group nesting itself i mean in theory the database offers it the data is there two points first it's how complex code second we might not have the access permissions by active directory to see all this information and this is that's why it's so important that we have to rely on domain controllers to calculate group memberships with all its nesting at successful login time we have no way to calculate it on our own essentially it comes down to if you log into unix box that is part of active directory using windbind you are root on that box the piece that doesn't work is id blank username as root this doesn't work if you ssh into that box as a successful login as that user typing in id without username hey i want to find my groups that works what does not work is id blank username typed in as root because i have not done a successful authentication against the domain controller one of the big misunderstandings that we that i face really in customer scenarios not daily but monthly at least yes go here go token group is not reliable once you enter trusts you are not able to contact the trust of domain controller and so on i mean it's it's a mess you don't even know that you're deprived of all the access to that yeah i mean there's one way we're working on this um there is a service that microsoft offers its service for you to self adreas already mentioned that that is supposed to do something similar um that will solve it okay um then another slide that is a bit out of topic here windbind nss info um so windbind as a client can provide the name service which info essentially it can fake etc password etc group how does it do that windows doesn't know about the concept of a login shop windows doesn't know about the concept of a home directory the same semantics that unix expects it and we have some same changes here active directory can hold all this information in adab attributes we can read that one particular change is i think when did that go in in 4.7 4.6 or 4.7 that went in if you look at the active directory users and groups tool there's two primary groups first in the windows group tab and then in the sf you she schema extension tab and before the change i think it was 4.6 before this change we always went in and used the windows primary group and expected to have some external id mapping for this windows primary group which was in most of the cases is just domain users and a lot of customers for whatever reason refuse to map windows domain users to a unix group because they have applied this separate primary group for a user in the active directory sfu tab and this is something that we recently i have it there 4.6 some only looked at the windows group and we changed this now so that you can be more flexible and say okay if you have these sfu extensions you don't want to map the unix domain the windows primary group yeah just go here and say unix primary group equals yes and then you can have a per user primary out of primary group out of the sfu tab okay that's it questions lights on uh oh thanks yeah so if i record correctly a customer i said i have a summer um environment as clients 18 clients yeah and it could easily do get and possibly get and group on those machines yeah so what if you say that winbind only gets the information and successful logging how did that work um that's different um so the question was how does get and password get and get and group work that does work although you don't want it and we disable it by default get and password will enumerate all users and in large active directories this can be slow you don't want this we disable this by default it's listing users can be done via add up or it can't it can active directory can't prohibit this so it's it's not reliable in many environments works but it's not reliable the other thing that doesn't work is getting the list of groups a user is member of that piece is utterly unreliable just listing users listing groups is one thing but you're getting the reliable up-to-date information about which groups is a user member of and this is the only one a file server is interested in that piece doesn't work what is there what is the scenario where this is dynamic i mean it's a quite you know i have my admin Saturday and i you know do all the changes required for my office business company whatever and then that's not for the next two months so where's the imagine semen's people go come and go every single hour people change groups every single hour yeah okay so it's it's it that's highly dynamic and you have to ask that information at log in time and as i said please don't ever type in wba for minus u2 list users this can take down your active directory because it's just too slow more questions thank you okay thank you


Because I went into it not thinking I can't do this, man. I went into it with a strategy. I had an open mindedness. So until your mind is open to the possibilities that I can do this, you would never be able to do it. Once the mind starts to believe it can be achieved, it then only then does it start to break down tactically how we can do this. Our trainer pushed us to pick a goal outside of our comfort zone. Just recently, we took a bunch of us to do a tough matter. And certainly I know when we first thought I'll do a tough matter a while ago, when we read what it didn't tell us, that both of us were like, no, it's never gonna happen. Remember tomorrow. When I have to make that decision, I think about how will I feel tomorrow based on the decision I make today? And we set a goal for ourselves and we had to tell people in our lives, know this personal goal, this fitness goal for me is more important than going out Saturday night. Measure yourself at anything. I'm gonna run a mile in the treadmill. Then see it be, maybe six minutes, maybe 11 minutes. And then just work for four months, then repeat the same test.  Give yourself something. Cause without having that goal there, you're just going to the gym and like lifting for no reason or running for no reason. And like you don't know if you're getting better. We're on mile 64, we've been on a couple of days.  In 23 minutes, we did mile one.  Nine, it's a 10 mile race. It's going to be pain either way. So it's either pain of change or pain of being stuck. The thing about the tough matter is it is a team sport. And we are here for each other. And the only way that a lot of us are going to get over these obstacles is if we help out each other. Two, three, two, one. They're good, man.  But as you've oriented yourself to that goal, you have that just in the foreground of like, hey, man, I'm going to run these 13.1 miles. This is going to be pretty awesome when it's done. And now, okay, let's do a tough matter. This one was certainly one that I a few years ago wouldn't have thought I was going to be doing. And now that it's come and went, I am ready for the next one. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that. To me, that looked more of the best of Johnny's misses from the tough matter. I can tell you this, that electrocution not only scared us, but it was absolutely torturous. I don't know that we'll be doing another tough matter, but we have a challenge for you. How are you going to face your fears? Is there something that you've been thinking about, nervous about, scared about doing? I know we were nervous going into the tough matter, but we conquer that challenge and we're ready for you to take on your fears. Get after it. Be free.


I have never been happier to lose subscribers than today. In one fell swoop, I had lost all the subscribers with less than 60 IQ. All the subscribers were grandiose enough to believe that they know medicine better than medical doctors and experts. And all the subscribers who are sufficiently psychopathic to be defiant, conchumatious, reckless and to endanger the lives of others. Such scum, I don't want on my channel. Farewell, honeys! Okay, my name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology. As an aside, I have medical education, a secret none of you knew before you commented on the previous video.  I'm sure that will fulfill your day because you are capable of doing nothing else probably in life, in your empty lives. And today I propose empty lives, we're going to discuss love addiction. But before I go into this highly complex and very new topic in psychopathology, I would like to make clear that love addicts fall in love not only with real intimate partners. They fall in love not only with people they had met, people they had chatted with, people they had worked with, people they had shared experiences with, people they had been intimate with sexually or otherwise. They fall in love also with total complete strangers they had just met and known nothing about. They fall in love with fantasies. They fall in love with characters from books and from films, movies. They fall in love in their minds. Love addicts, love addiction is a fantasy defense. The fantasy could be displaced and projected upon a real person. That real person could be a true intimate partner deeply involved and enmeshed in the love addicts life. Or that other person could be a total stranger the love addict had just met. Or it could be a fictional character, believe it or not. There had been such documented cases. Love addiction is a fantasy defense and it leads to dysregulated and unboundary behaviors. The love addict would do anything to perpetuate the fantasy of love, to perpetuate the rush because love addiction as the name implies, is an addiction. To continue the love coming, to continue the experience of infatuation and limerence, the love addict would do anything. She would engage in hyper promiscuous behaviors. In group sex, she would drink to oblivion. She would cater to the real or imagined needs of her partner, fulfill all his fantasies, no matter how extreme they are. She would do anything. She would do anything because she's a junkie. And why do I keep saying she? Because the vast majority of love addicts are unsurprisingly women. Love addiction is closely allied with codependency and other issues. We'll tackle this in the continuation of this video. These two points are crucial though. The role of fantasy in love addiction is enormous. It outweighs the role of fantasy in typical normal romantic love. And love addiction, like many other addictions by the way, love addiction leads to extreme emotional dysregulation, modulability and unboundary behavior. Behavior which is often socially unacceptable, reprehensible, problematic, dysfunctional, reckless, or just off-putting or choking. Having said all this, let us dive right in. And we start with an article by Sanchez, John and others, published in 2019. The article is titled, Treatment of Love Addiction, Current Status and Perspectives. It was published in the European Journal of Psychiatry, Volume 33. Love addiction, also known as pathological love, according to this article, refers to a pattern of behavior characterized by a maladaptive, pervasive and excessive interest towards one or more romantic partners resulting in lack of control, the renouncing of other interests and behavior, and other negative consequences. I will only add to this the fantasy element. So this behavior could be motivated by total fantasy, which has nothing to do or little to do with reality. For example, fantasy projected onto a total stranger. And the other thing I would add to this is the element of unboundary, dysregulated behavior. The love addict sacrifices her standards, her values in the pursuit of the, of love, in the pursuit of the addiction of love. And when she does this, of course, she experiences dissonance and she resolves the dissonance either by dissociating the ego-dystonic incidents, dissociating her misbehavior, dissociating her misconduct, or by reframing the whole situation and saying, well, I actually wanted it. I did it because I desired it. I wanted it. Very important thing in love addiction is to understand that what love addicts call love is not love and has very little to do with love. What love addicts call love is actually being desired, experiencing lust, infatuation, limerence, the dopamine rush of attraction, the chase. So what love addicts call love are typically the initial, the extremely initial phases in romantic love or even just in an encounter between two parties. So the love addict would tell you that sexual attraction is love, that infatuation is love, that limerence is love, that dysregulated sexual behavior is indicative of love, that sex leads to love, that the first phases of being fascinated and intrigued and inexorably drawn to someone is love. The definition of love is so wide and so fuzzy that literally any interaction between the love addict and another person is immediately translated into a perception or a misperception of love and that's where the fantasy comes in. In love addiction, immature love, love that is uncertain, external, blind, dysregulated, beyond one's control and discipline, in defiance of standards, values and norms, this kind of love is the only love there is. We don't know how prevalent love addiction is, we think it's anywhere between 3% to 10% of the population and we found much higher incidents among college students and of course you must distinguish pathological love from other conditions which imitate pathological love, dependent personality disorder or codependency, borderline personality disorder. In these disorders, the dysfunctional behaviors characterize every dimension of existence, it's not limited to love. While in the love addict, the rest of the love addict's life, the love addict's career, the love addict's family of origin, the love addict's friendships, the love addict's behavior in public places, the rest of the love addict's behavior is highly normative and highly regulated. Only when it comes to attachments, only when it comes to interacting with potential partners does the addiction manifest. Addiction is not a psychotic disorder and love addiction is not sex addiction, is not a rotomania. Love addicts can go years without sex, they can be celibate. It's not, it's not to do with any of this, it's a delusional disorder. It's a kind of fantasy defense. A rotomania, for example, is a delusion that someone is in love with the individual. And in some respects, a rotomania and love addiction share this in common. The love addict can mistake behaviors and utterances, speech acts by another person, a total stranger, to mean love. Pathological love appears to be an impulse control disorder. It is characterized by impulsivity, novelty seeking, and therefore it has an interface with psychopathy. Psychopaths are risk takers, reckless, novelty seekers, impulsive and to some extent defined. And so love addiction is very common among cluster B patients, narcissistic patients and psychopathic patients. Pathological love is also a mood disorder. These people experience extreme mood states like hypomania or elation. So they have mood liability and they use love or the misperception of love or what they call love, which is essentially just attraction, mainly sexual attraction or limerence or infatuation. They use this to regulate their moods. You could say that love addicts are constantly in a state of falling in love. They are in constant, they are all the time falling in love. They can't exit this stage of intense romance. They seek it, they are addicted to it and they can never extricate themselves from it. In this limited view, love addiction is an obsession or compulsion or both. It's an obsessive compulsive behavior. People with love addiction experience repetitive and intrusive thoughts, but the obsessions pertain to a person they are attracted to, a person they love, a person they are infatuated with, a person they fall in love with, sometimes on first sight, sometimes secretly, sometimes from afar, sometimes without communicating anything to the unsuspecting stranger. Some researchers suggested that love addiction could be understood as what we call a biaxial continuum. The vertical axis is attachment, the horizontal axis is reward-seeking and impulsivity. In some individuals, high impulsivity and reward-seeking behavior co-occur with high levels of attachment behavior and that results in obsessive or dependent kind of love. In others, high reward-seeking and impulsivity co-occur with attachment deficits and this results in high sexual interest and multiple sex partners. Be it as it may, pathological love is an addiction. It's what we call process addiction or behavioral addiction. It's not an addiction to a chemical substance, although dopamine is of course a neurotransmitter in many respects of biochemical. But this addiction is exactly the equivalent of chemical addiction. In the first stages, love addicts experience intense pleasure, satisfaction, elation and euphoria. They become preoccupied with these experiences. They show signs of dependence. So as the article says, there are increased amounts of the behavior to achieve the desired emotional effect. In other words, to increase the time spent love-seeking. So there are urges to continue engaging in the behavior despite trying to stop. So when the love addict is not pursuing these behaviors, she feels alone, she feels desperate when she is no longer in a relationship and in this sense, she is a lot like the borderline. The borderline reacts this way to abandonment and rejection. The love addict reacts this way to a lack of stimulus. She is addicted to the stimuli that come from infatuation and courtship and chase and sex. So she would tend to transition smoothly and seamlessly from one relationship to another. Many of these relationships are imaginary. Many of these relationships are fantastic and only in the love addict's mind. Many of these relationships in today's world are digital, digital using cameras. But she can't be without someone in her life with whom she believes herself to be falling in love. It's not love that interests her. It's falling in love that interests her. So as the article says, there's a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control the behavior. Such people may decide I would never fall in love again. But in reality, when the relationship ends, it is replaced immediately. The love addict reaches out compulsively to the next one and the next target and the next partner. Real, imaginary, fantastic, total stranger, good friend, someone she needs someone in her life. There's abandoned behavior, neurochemical and neuroimaging evidence to support the claim that love is or could be an addiction much the same way that chronic drug-seeking behavior can signal an addiction and in love addicts it's gone awry. It's gone awry. So love addiction or pathological love is a behavioral addiction characterized by attempts to regain extremely pleasurable feelings associated with the state of being deeply in love. It's linked to reckless behavior, unboundary behavior and negative outcomes to one's life. I refer you to two additional articles. Susman, Love Addiction, Definition, etiology and treatment 2010, Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity Vol. 17 and ERP, E-A-A-R-P, ERP, Wudałczyk and FOD, F-O-D-D-Y and others. An article is titled Addicted to Love, What is Love Addiction and When Should It Be Treated? It was published in Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, Vol. 24 and we will come to it a bit, we'll come to some of their insights a bit later. It's a great overview. This last article is a great overview of the question Is Love an Addiction? I have a video on this channel about love as a pathology and I recommend that you watch it. The Love Addict. The Love Addict is desperate. The need for rush, the love rush, the need for this next dose, next fix of love. This creates emotional despair, the fear of rejection of being alone. They endlessly search for someone. They feel that they are not whole, they are not complete without someone. But they don't want love. They don't want to be loved. They don't want intimacy. They can't do intimacy actually. They want the initial stage only. They want infatuation only, limerence only, the drug, the document rush only. They want the attraction, they want the chase, but they don't want the whole package. When they get the whole package, when someone loves them, offers them intimacy, they sabotage, they undermine the relationship, they withdraw, they become approach avoidant. Love addicts are attracted to the intense experience of falling in love. They don't seek peaceful intimacy. They perceive intimacy as mini-death, kind of death. They are bored with a real, true, deep relationship. And so they are much more into hunting. They are like hunters. They hunt for the one, but they never want anyone to be that one. Their life choices and decision-making of love addicts is based on the desire and the search for a perfect, unattainable relationship. So everything they do is to look for a partner which can never materialize, can never be realized. And there's no healthy intimacy or healthy romance. There's just this intense drug fix. And there's consequently no bonding and no intimate attachment. They probably have severe attachment problems. And because their relationships never develop and never reach emotional maturity, they feel detached. They feel unhappy, restless, irritable and discontent. When the rush fades, when they need the next fix, when they are not in a relationship though, they feel desperate, unworthy, alone. And so they keep looking for a new potential mate to experience this high of falling in love once more.  They don't waste a minute.  The next thing they do is look for someone. I'm going to read to you a list from the website called The Ranch. It's a good list. Well-compiled list of signs of love addiction. Mistaking intense sexual experiences and new romantic excitement for love. This confusion is very critical. It's the hallmark of love addiction. The love addicts have the craziest sexual experiences. Totally socially unacceptable. Totally dissonant and ego-dystonic. Experiences which would traumatize and shock everyone. But they regard it actually as romantic excitement or even as love, or the beginning of love at least. Constantly craving and searching for a romantic relationship. When in a relationship, being desperate to please, fearful of the other's unhappiness. So love addicts would do anything. Love addicts are pushed to participate in gangbanks and in group sex by the intimate partner because they are the most extreme form of people pleases imaginable. When not in a relationship feeling desperate and alone. Inability to maintain an intimate relationship once the newness and excitement have worn off. Finding it unbearable or emotionally difficult to be alone. When not in a relationship compulsively using sex and fantasy to fill in the loneliness. Choosing partners who are emotionally unavailable and or verbally or physically abusive. Choosing partners who demand a great deal of attention and care-taking but who do not meet or even try to meet the emotional and physical needs of the love addict. Participating in activities that do not interest you or that go against your personal values in order to keep or to please a partner. So a love addict would do anything. She would create self-ponography on camera and distribute it to hundreds of people just to please her partner's fantasy. She would fulfill the partner's wishes sexual, emotional and others. She would do anything. There are no boundaries and no limits to what she would do. Giving up important interests, beliefs or friendships in order to maximize time in the relationship to please a romantic partner. Using sex, seduction and manipulation, guilt and shame to hook or hold on to a partner. Using sex or romantic intensity to tolerate difficult experiences or emotions. Missing out on important family, career or social experiences in order to search for a romantic or sexual relationship. Using anonymous sex, pornography or compulsive masturbation to avoid needing someone to avoid all relationships. So there are periods in the love addict's life where she is celibate and compulsively masturbates or when she consumes pornography or when she creates pornography and distributes it self-ponography, pornography with her body or when she does anonymous sex. And when I say anonymous sex, I mean like totally casual sex. Sleeping with men after one hour and one drink. Finding difficult or impossible to leave unhealthy or abusive relationships despite repeated promises to oneself or to others to do so. Repeatedly returning to previously unmanageable or painful relationships despite promises to oneself or to others to not do so. So this is a partial list. This is a partial list. There are other signs, for example, needing to be in love, putting the romantic partner on a pedestal, obsessing over romantic interest, experiencing cravings, withdrawals, euphoria and dependency on the partner, needing to fall in love very often, seeking emotional comfort from a partner to the point of unrequited love and an inability to be alone. These are all all marks and signs of love addiction. Of course, all romantic relationships have elements of this. But we are not talking about elements. We are talking about a preponderance of these dysfunctional behaviors, choices and decisions. We are talking about extreme unboundary behavior intended to please the intimate partner or a fantastic intimate partner, not even a real one, a total stranger. We are talking about extreme modulability, highly reactive and dependent upon infatuation and limerence. And so this dysregulation, this lack of boundaries, this sacrifice of standards and values, just in order to please a romantic partner which very often doesn't even exist except in the love addict's mind, this is love addiction. Love addicts are searching for something outside of themselves, a person, a relationship, an experience, a stranger who could be theoretically be perceived as an intimate partner. They are looking for these people to provide them with emotional and life stability. They feel that they miss something. They need another half. They are like complete and whole and stable only when they have someone in their lives. Love addicts use their intensely stimulating romantic experiences, falling in love, to fix themselves, to feel emotionally stable. They feel when they fall in love, they feel alive. So there are profound elements of self-harming in love addiction. It's exactly like someone who self-mutilates, the borderline, for example, the love addict feels alive when she is falling in love, even with a total stranger who is not aware that she exists. She feels that she can drown out negative interjects, negative moods, negative affectivity during the process of falling in love. These are classic self-harming functions. Now, we said that love addiction creates fixations and compulsions and it's unhealthy. We dwelt upon the issue of extreme people pleasing. And the problem is that love addicts try to please real or imaginary intimate partners, not in accordance with the needs of these partners, but in accordance with the fantasies of these partners. So it's not that the love addict tries to cater to the needs of the intimate partner. What she's trying to do is fulfill his wishes and fantasies. So this results in a monopoly of these functions, mess, chaotic relationships.  This intense passion is always contrasted with the intense disappointment and heartbreak. And it creates anticipatory anxiety. The love addict fully expects to be dumped, to be abandoned, to be rejected exactly like the borderline. But in her case, being rejected and being abandoned and being humiliated leads to dysfunctional behaviors which are simply intended to find the next target, the next so-called intimate partner. So while the borderline acts out and becomes self-destructive and other destructive, the love addict simply moves on. She's heartbroken and she moves on to mend and to fix her heart with the next men or next intimate partner. Emotional problems of the love addict can be fixed only by falling in love so she believes. Emotional distress, compulsive behaviors, obsessions, they're all about falling in love. And so very commonly, love addicts find themselves in toxic and abusive relationships because they idolize their love interests, they idealize their love interests. They pursue relationships for the sake of the honeymoon phase, the grooming, the love bombing. While healthy people try to continue beyond the love bombing and grooming phase, the love addict actually seeks exclusively the honeymoon phase. She becomes very clingy and overly dependent on anyone who can provide her with this drug. And the love addict needs to idealize her partner because in order to fulfill his wishes and fantasies she needs to reframe him as worthy of her sacrifice because she often sacrifices her standards, her values, her decency, her self-respect, her dignity. She self-trashes sexually and otherwise. She would do anything. And when I say anything, trust me, I mean anything. Even if the partner is emotionally not responsive, not affectionate, abusive, she would still go. Go for it. She would still continue. We don't know why. Genetics, trauma, we don't know why. We know that love addicts have low self-esteem and other underlying problems, mainly mood disorders and anxiety disorders. But we don't know if these are causative, if these are connected or only correlated or maybe one led to the other, the love addiction led to these. We don't know which preceded which. And love addicts, exactly like codependence in the initial phase, in the infatuation or limerence phase, they become emotionally extortionate. They emotionally blackmail the partner. They guilt-trip the partner. They shame the partner. And it's all done in order to fill in void. And this void can be the result of childhood trauma, like sexual abuse, low self-worth or fluctuating sense of self-worth, lack of self-love, or having been rejected or abandoned or neglected as a child. It may all be simply a form of abandonment anxiety or abandonment fear. Lust for the partner. Its experience is lust. Its experience is an irresistible sexual urge. And it creates obsessiveness. Because we know that sexual activity releases chemicals. And the first step of a love addict is sex. The love addict would have sex on the first day. She would have sex after one hour. She would have sex after one drink.  And she firmly believes that sex leads to love, not the other way around. I repeat, sex leads to love. She needs to sleep with someone. Because it is sex that is the first inkling, first hint, a foreshadowing of love.  In itself fulfilling of the curiosity of the other. In itself a form of communication which binds and bonds. The love addict regards sex, immediate, instant sex, unbridled, non-normative, unbounded, right away promiscuous sex. As a form of love. As falling in love. And this may have to do with the chemicals released during sex, like oxytocin. But we don't know. It may also have to do with low self-esteem. Having sex buttresses self-esteem. We simply don't know. It's a very new field. It's a very new field. It experiences life, excitement and value when she has sex for the first time.  Because she had already projected onto them her fantasy that they are potential or even actual intimate partners. Even in one night's tense, crazily, when she knows full well that she will never see that person again, the love addict is in love.  And so this creates a lot of pressure on the partner to be everything. This eliminates emotional boundaries and develops leads to co-dependent unions. Because the love addict feels that the partner has all the traits that she lacks. She idealizes the partner. She constantly seeks approval for the partner. Again, it seems that there is a lot of childhood trauma in the past of love addicts. Child abuse, rejection, emotional neglect. We are not quite sure yet. Susan Peabody had written about love addiction. And she made a distinction between four types of love addicts. Susan Peabody. Obsessed, obsessive love addicts, co-dependent love addicts, narcissistic love addicts and ambivalent love addicts. According to Susan Peabody, obsessed love addicts struggle with detaching from the partner, even if the relationship is no longer healthy or the partner is emotionally distant. The co-dependent love addict uses her partner for her source of self-esteem and self-worth. She is a people-pleaser in relationships hoping to get validation from the significant other. If the other partner is co-dependent as well, it may not be a problem early into the relationship, but resentment can build if the partner seeks a more emotionally independent partner. Co-dependent love addicts can look for worth in their relationships and may give to the point of exhaustion. They are compulsive givers. They connect with partners who have addictions or are emotionally unavailable wanting to fix the partner. Love addiction has more dependence on a partner in comparison to co-dependency even. Love addicts expect partners to give them purpose, but they are unable to receive love from the partner and this creates a catch-22. Narcissistic love addicts, according to Susan Peabody, are also in a position of power in their relationship. They exploit the partner, using the partner for a source of attention, ego-boosting, servitude and more. Additionally, narcissistic love addicts can severely mistreat the partner by ignoring the partner and acting out in selfishness. And despite all this, they are attached to the partner, of course, as a source of supply. And lastly, the ambivalent or avoidant love addict. She avoids true intimacy. She functions as the one who holds on to past loves. When she starts a new relationship, she drags her previous lovers into the relationship. She usually runs two or three parallel relationships because she can't let go. She engages in one-sided relationships, unrequited love, and often sabotages relationships. And these ambivalent relationships and these ambivalent or avoidant love addicts, they are addicted to the illusion of relationships, but they run away or they are inconsistent about getting real close, real intimate. And so all these types of love addicts use sex to maintain unhealthy attachments, to lie, to manipulate, to play out past relationship dynamics, to bridge boundaries, including social mores, norms, and conventions.  So love addicts segue. They don't have clean breaks. They would usually cheat as a bridge to the next relationship, and they very often would maintain parallel relationships for a few months until they decide who is who. And who is the next love interest. Love addiction exists with other mental or emotional challenges. I mentioned a few personality disorders, trauma. All these can lead to love addiction. The highs of love, the dopamine release, the rush, is typical of addictive personalities in general. And so the neediness, this addiction, love addiction or relationship addiction, usually goes with other addictions, with substance abuse, for example. The obsessive love addict cannot maintain the attention or affection of the loved one for long. And so this creates anxiety or depression as all relationships inevitably fall apart. And they fall apart because of the love addict, not because of the partner. The love addict needs her fix. She needs to fall in love again. She needs to be infatuated. She needs limerence, so she cheats. And she moves on. The stress that love addicts can place themselves in to obtain love, the compulsive need to maintain relationship. This destroys the rest of their lives. It destroys their careers, their well-being. They begin to abuse substances, do drugs. They neglect themselves, self-care. They neglect their needs. They become utterly consumed by the highs and lows. The highs and lows becomes the regulatory mechanism. They seek the high when they are low and they anticipate the low when they are high. And so they self-medicate or self-soothe to avoid the low. They are unable to function within healthy patterns. They need someone to love. They need someone to be loved by. So when they fail, they would castigate themselves but they would accuse the partner of betrayal. So they're always frustrated, always rejected and rejecting. And the betrayal, the perceived betrayal by the partner creates uncomfortable feelings. And these people become gradually very hyper-vigilant, a bit vindictive, somewhat sadistic. There's an underlying shame, guilt, void, dissonance. And the need for healing increases all the time because the wound expands all the time. Obsessiveness and anxiety at desperate attempts to somehow exert control over the situation. But love addicts cannot fix anything alone. They keep failing and their self-awareness is very, very low. We use cognitive behavior therapy to help. Meditation sometimes. But it's limited. It's a limited thing because love addicts are in the throes of enormous amount of suffering. We need to build their sense of self-worth. We need to fill in the void, the emptiness that Kernbeck had described. How to do this? So there are rehab facilities and there's even a kind of self-help group. I think it's called just give me a sec. I saw it somewhere. It's called sex and love addicts anonymous. But the success is pretty limited. Addictions in general are very hard to cure because they cater to a monopoly of needs in very important psychological needs. And no one likes to feel that they don't exist or that they are empty. No one likes to experience the absence. And that's where love addiction comes in. A fake ersatz solution. I want to be one make-belief way out which never works until the next victim, the next intimate partner, the next stranger and the unbridled, unregulated, dysregulated and unboundary sex that comes with it. Only to sink deeper into shame and guilt and dissonance and to need to become more needy, more compulsive in searching for the next partner.


The whole market cap is only about less $400 billion, it's nothing. The whole point of blockchain is to democratize investing. Everyone is smart enough to lose money or make money. Hi everyone, welcome to BlockShow Europe 2018. We're here today with Amir and we're going to be talking a bit about blockchain. So I'd first like to ask you to introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about your contribution to the crypto and blockchain space. My name is Amir Rosik, I've been a serial entrepreneur for my whole life. I've actually been involved in the blockchain space way before any of this ICO craze for the last four or five years. In the last two years I've been focusing on building block geeks and what block geeks does is we train developers online. So we're an agnostic platform, so we do Solidity training, C++ training, we'll do Cosmos, we'll do Rootstock, we'll do EOS, we'll do everything. And pretty much we help you as a developer get onboarded in the blockchain space as a developer. Great, so blockchain is becoming a bit of a buzzword recently. So I wanted to ask you how do you think you can keep blockchain mainstream without it becoming too much of an overused phrase that's just thrown around? How do you keep it real and keep the development going forward? I don't think so an individual can keep it real or stop where it's going to go. There's a Buddhist saying it is how it should be, there is no right or wrong. There's actually three different worlds in here. You have the open source ethos, the cypherpunks, the original ones who care about cryptography, who care about actually creating something that's truly decentralized. And then you have maybe the Ethereum crowd where there's still cypherpunks and they care about decentralization but they're more quicker to break things and experiment. And then you have all the above where you have the ICOs, then you have the private chains, these are permissioned blockchains whether it's used for enterprise or supply chain, etc. So for us saying this is good or bad I think it is how it is. I think the more people involved creates more entropy, more feedback loop systems and through this process we'll figure out what works well doesn't work and who knows where we'll be in the next couple of years. So blockchain may be affected now by the recent passing of the EU privacy bill that you do PR. So what are your thoughts on that? How do you think the two work don't work? I think if you are a private DAP that you control the code affects you but if you're an open source decentralized platform it's not applicable to you because there's no ownership there, there's nobody's staking claim that I'm the CEO of Bitcoin or I'm the CEO of Monero. But if you are an ICO and you say I'm the founder of this project, you're liable. That makes sense. So do you think that going forward with crypto regulation, blockchain regulation some cryptocurrencies are going to be classified as securities now because there is that ICO, that founder, that centralized aspect of it? Yeah the SEC they've been coming out with their statements, their statements and there's legislation. Those are two different things. And so far since the last meeting it was actually quite positive note they left off because it's not that black and white where it's going to be securities or non-securities. It could be variable where at one point it is a security then it turns into a non-security or vice versa. And I think they're trying to figure out a new hybrid variation of the Howie test, the regional security test because this isn't applicable in today's model. But I think we will see, we will hear or we will get a real legal ruling within the next year. The SEC will actually come out in state. This is their final judgment on what they deem a token to be or not to be. So since you said you've been in this space for a long time, how do you feel like the public has been reacting to it from the beginning and now? What are the differences you see in the main players? Well pre-circa 2017 it was very focused on real businesses. Like there was focus on cryptography, technologies, focus on the true ethos of blockchain. During the ICO craze that kind of fell through because everyone's building on top of these platforms and they're assuming people are building on these platforms which is a big assumption which is not the case. There's very limited people building these big protocols. And so I think right now greed is a hell of a thing and a lot of people see an opportunity to raise money that they couldn't raise money before. My stance on ICOs is short term I'm not a big fan of them, long term I am a fan of them. You have the technology hurdle you've got to solve, you have the legal hurdle you've got to solve. What I mean by legal is the whole point of blockchain is to democratize investing.   And so when these securitized tokens come out again or they want to take the blockchain and make it securitized it defeats the whole purpose of it.  I absolutely hate it that I'm only allowed to invest. Everyone is smart enough to lose money or make money. And so what we'll see in the next two or three years is still focusing on the technology. You can have all the regulations up here but the fundamental issue is the technology is still naive. It's very new. We have a couple of years to build out the protocols. Whether it's Ethereum, EOS, Rootstock, Cosmos, Polkadot coming out next year, etc. These are all big theories and theories that haven't been shipped out to the market yet and they haven't been under stress tests yet to the big degree because think about it, the whole market cap is only about less $400 billion. It's nothing. What happens when we have trillions of dollars in multiple smart contracts and actual people's pension plans on this? That's a serious deal. So we have a long way to go before we actually see legitimate use cases of this technology for the broader audiences. And what concrete steps need to be taken in order for that to happen? Does it involve regulation on a global scale, not global scale? No, I think this has nothing to do with regulation. This has to do purely with the technology. Thinking like baby steps. Okay, you're an ICO. Let's say hypothetically your token does make sense. Like one of the rare ones out of like millions, right? Okay, cool. There are some that make sense, right? You can do 14 transactions a second. You know what I mean? Yeah. So you can't even feasibly build a scalable company. You're at the mercy of the protocol, regardless of if you go here or there, all these different platforms currently today. And so I think a lot of the people who want to build these startups, they need to focus on the reality of like the technology is still not here yet. So you mean like second layer solutions, like lightning network? Yeah, second layer is needed, whether it's lightning network, whether it's plasma, whether it's, you know, proof of stake, whether it's delegated proof of stake for EOS, whatever it may be. It doesn't really matter. I think the more the better to see what works or doesn't work, but these scaling solutions are needed. And even though there's people out there that state on paper, paper works. Well, I can point to a lot of things on paper that works, but in reality, the marketplace doesn't work, right? A communism on paper is perfect. We all know where that heads, right? And so I think we need to really still focus on building actual technology. And once a foundation is there, then you can actually scale. All right. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on blockchain and crypto and for coming to BlockShow Europe. It my pleasure. Thank you so much.