About David A. Haines

Alright, you want to know who I am and why you should listen to anything I have to say?

Fair question.

For most of my adult life, I was like Mel Fisher—that treasure hunter who spent 16 years looking for a sunken Spanish galleon. Every morning he'd say "Today's the day!" despite losing everything. Financial ruin. Personal loss. The whole deal. Then on July 20, 1985, he found half a billion dollars in treasure.

I was chasing my own version of that. Started with the dot-com dream—day-old pizza, sleeping under my desk, convinced the next release would be the one. When that bubble popped, it took everything with it.

So I found what I thought was a better path. Network marketing. Building systems to help people succeed. Real mentorship, you know?

I studied under Tom "Big Al" Schreiter—the OG of network marketing psychology. Guy who literally wrote the books on this stuff. Then I got recruited into a system run by Michael Dlouhy, one of Big Al's top earners. And I got good. Really good. I taught personality profiling and communication techniques to thousands of people across six continents.

They were grooming me for the top. Private dinners with the founder. Vacations with the inner circle. I had a front-row seat to how it all really worked.

Here's the part they don't advertise: sometimes the treasure map is designed to keep you digging forever. Sometimes "you have potential" just means "you're useful." Sometimes "are you coachable?" means "will you shut up and do what we say?" And sometimes—this is the kicker—the people teaching you how to help others are actually teaching you how to extract value from them.

I spent ten years after I left thinking I failed because I wasn't good enough. Wasn't hungry enough. Didn't want it badly enough.

Turns out? I didn't fail. I refused to cross the one line that would've made me "successful" in a system designed to screw over 98% of the people in it.

I could teach the techniques. I could build the infrastructure. I could close three out of four people when I was doing it "for the system."

But when it came to looking someone in the eye and selling them a dream I knew was broken—when it was MY name attached to their outcome? I couldn't do it.

For a decade, I thought that was weakness.

Now I know it was the only part of me that refused to get completely corrupted.

So yeah, after that I spent years bouncing around. Brilliant ideas. Half-finished projects. I could see connections nobody else saw—that wasn't the problem. My ADHD brain would just hit overload, the project would turn into this overwhelming mountain, and I'd stall out. Every single time.

It was getting old, you know? Having all these ideas and watching them die in my head because I couldn't get them out into the world.

Then everyone started freaking out about AI. "It's gonna take our jobs!" "Enslave humanity!" The whole panic. I figured if it was taking over anyway, might as well see what the fuss was about.

You know what I found? The AI they give us can't actually think. So world domination's off the table. It's more like an overexcited puppy that sometimes pees on your project. But here's the thing—that puppy broke my paralysis. It chunked all that overwhelming stuff into manageable pieces. Projects that would've collected dust for another decade? Getting finished.

And the moment I finally had the tool to get the treasure, I realized something.

The treasure was never the point.

I spent decades learning how to extract value from people. Now I'm learning how to build it. I learned to read people so I could manipulate them. Now I'm learning to read situations so I can help them. I chased success that required someone else to fail. Now I'm trying to figure out what it looks like when nobody has to lose for me to win.

These days I'm writing Using AI For Us Regular Folks—700 pages for people who don't want to become prompt engineers, they just want to get shit done. I'm working on a thriller series set in West Virginia (company towns, coal barons, modern extraction schemes—turns out I know way more about how those work than I'd like to). I run free AI workshops for seniors and other folks who got left behind by the tech boom. And I became a Notary. Not for the money—to be someone people can actually count on.

Oh, and I'm writing a Substack series documenting all those manipulation techniques I learned, deployed, and eventually walked away from.

Not for redemption. I don't get that. I built parts of the machine.

But for documentation. Because the next hustle is already here, and it's using the same playbook with a different cover.

Here's what I learned after spending a lifetime chasing treasure:

The real prize is learning to spot the difference between building something real and just operating a more sophisticated extraction machine.

I spent years learning how to engineer consent, create dependency, and turn manipulation into scalable systems. Those skills don't just disappear. I still catch myself reading people, adjusting my communication style, thinking about how to "position" information.

The difference now is I see it happening. And I'm choosing to document it instead of deploy it.

Not because I'm better than I was. Because I finally understand what I was actually doing.

Right now I'm in an attic in West Virginia—which is fitting because this is where both the coal barons and the MLM diamonds ran their schemes on the same desperate populations, just generations apart. That's where all of this is happening. The AI guide. The thriller series. The Substack on manipulation. All of it while trying to figure out how to hope again after spending ten years living like there was no future.

The warning bells work now. I just wish they'd worked sooner.