THEE BIG SWING

For much of my life, I chased security, money, responsibility, and what I thought I was supposed to want. But while I was out walking, a thought came to me that I could not shake: What if I have been chasing the wrong things? At sixty-two, time feels different. The future no longer feels endless, and the possibility of reaching the end of my life with important parts of myself still unexplored has...

Today started as the first time I sat down to record and did not know exactly what I wanted to say. But maybe that was the point. In this episode of THEE BIG SWING, I reflect on two very different encounters: one conversation that felt more like being questioned than being known, and another with an 80-year-old woman who slowly let her guard down and reminded me how rich human connection can be. E...

Have you ever known exactly how you felt about someone — but when the moment came to say it out loud, the words disappeared? In this episode of THEE BIG SWING, I sit down with a listener for a deeply honest conversation about love, timing, regret, and the emotional cost of silence. She reflects on a moment when someone she cared about expressed how they felt — and although she felt the same way, s...

One of the strangest feelings in life is realizing someone has mistaken you for smaller than you are. In this episode of THEE BIG SWING , I share a recent experience that caught me completely off guard. What started as a friendly conversation over lunch turned into a moment where I felt questioned, underestimated, and profiled. My first instinct was to defend myself by listing my accomplishments,...

We often say love should be unconditional. But over time, she started to understand that love without boundaries, honesty, or self-respect can become something else entirely. Some moments stay with you because they reveal something bigger underneath them. A mother finds herself wrestling with something many people quietly feel — the lack of courtesy, gratitude, and emotional awareness that can exi...

Two years ago, my son was sleeping in his car in Los Angeles — working 80 hours a week, barely showering, and just trying to survive. Today, he is in a different place. Not perfect. Not finished. But clearer. In this episode of THEE BIG SWING, we sit down as father and son and talk honestly about what changed — and what did not. This is not really about trading. It is about discipline, frustration...

In this episode of THEE BIG SWING, I share something I have been noticing in the lives of four women who mean a great deal to me. They are all different — different ages, different personalities, different life experiences. But they had one thing in common: they were skeptical of AI and fiercely independent. At first, they wanted little to do with it. Then, one by one, something changed. As they b...

Some of us are not alive while we are here. This episode came from a moment I had recently — one I did not plan, but could not ignore. Sitting in a movie theater, I found myself thinking about something I have thought about many times before: the difference between the time I have lived and the time I likely have left. But this time, it stayed with me. What struck me most was not only that time is...

When I sat down with my sister, I thought we were going to talk about one big decision that changed her life. Instead, I discovered something even more powerful. Her story was not about one giant leap. It was about making the next right choice over and over again, even when she was not convinced she was capable of more. She grew up in poverty, became a young mother, struggled with self-doubt, work...

I thought AI was neutral. Then something happened that made me question that belief. In this episode of THEE BIG SWING, I reflect on a personal experience with ChatGPT that caught me off guard — a moment when the system seemed to make an assumption about my identity based on patterns, context, and incomplete signals. That moment opened up larger questions about trust, bias, race, technology, and w...

In 2017, I took an ancestry DNA test expecting no surprises. I was wrong. What began as simple curiosity became a journey of discovery — one that led me to a tiny island in the Dutch Caribbean where my grandfather was born, to relatives I never knew existed, to birth records dating back to the late 1800s, knowledge of great-great grandparents and ultimately to a life-changing realization. Along th...

What if one unexpected conversation could change the way you learn, think, and approach the rest of your life? In this episode of THE BIG SWING, Lloyd reflects on a summer evening in Washington Square Park, where a spontaneous conversation with a young professional introduced him to a new way of seeing artificial intelligence — not as something distant, technical, or only meant for younger generat...

In this episode of THEE BIG SWING, I sit down with a longtime friend for one of the most honest conversations we have ever had. After a 20-year marriage ended in a way he never expected, he found himself questioning everything. The pain was not only the divorce. It was trying to understand how someone who once loved him could suddenly want nothing to do with him. Like so many people, he faced hear...

For most of my life, I thought anger was simply part of who I was. It took me years to understand that anger does not only live inside you. It spills onto other people. It damages trust. It changes how people feel around you. And eventually, if you are not careful, it can cost you the very people you thought would always stay. In this episode of THEE BIG SWING, I share one of the most personal sto...

What happens when the opportunity you've been waiting for disappears? In the very first episode of THEE BIG SWING, Lloyd Hassel sits down with longtime friend and media personality Rhenotha Whitaker for an honest conversation about betting on yourself after the spotlight fades. After spending seven seasons on a nationally syndicated television talk show, Rhenotha found herself facing an unexp...