A night of physics that ended at the grip
The Golf Channel's headline for Bryson DeChambeau calls him a "Mad Scientist," and his own account of one bad night shows why. His third round at LIV Golf Korea went wrong. Hours on the range produced no answer, so he took the problem to Google's Gemini and worked through the physics of what makes a club turn over.
By his account, the conversation finished somewhere much plainer: "just grip pressure and tension." The next day he played with "a little bit more freer hands," shot 65 and finished third, one shot out of a playoff. He did not oversell it afterward. "I don't have the answer," he said. Nothing here claims the AI produced the 65.
Why the put-down misses
Golf analyst Andy Johnson dismissed the whole episode: "That's something your mom tells you before you go play a junior golf tournament." On the substance he has a point, since grip is among the first things any coach teaches. The more interesting question is why a player at that level had to travel the long way round to reach it.
Expertise moves your attention upward
Skill changes where people look. A beginner checks the fundamentals because there is nothing else to check. A veteran has years of evidence that the fundamentals hold, so attention drifts toward advanced explanations, the ones that feel worthy of the problem. The first thing learned becomes the last thing tested, and it earns that position by never having failed.
Leadership teams show the same drift. The most senior person on a stuck problem is the one most likely to skip the basics and the one least likely to be told so.
A bottom-up pass
AI is useful here for a narrow reason: it has no pride about level. It will follow you as far up the stack as you care to go, and it will come back down when asked. Three steps make that deliberate.
Describe the problem in full, at your own level. Include what you have already tried, so the tool does not simply hand it back.
Ask for the basics list. "What would someone new to this check first, and which of those have I not mentioned?" Ask for candidates, not a diagnosis.
Test the cheapest item first. The list is a set of hypotheses about a situation the tool cannot see. Confirm each one yourself before you change anything.
None of this makes the tool smarter than the person. It sends the person's attention back to somewhere it had stopped going.
Talking a problem through out loud, to a tool or a colleague, is a skill that improves with rehearsal: Rehearse talking a stuck problem through →
Keep reading: Ask AI what you left ambiguous · The reviewer folds when you press hardest. That is the moment you need it most.
This is the thinking behind a Trusted AI Culture.
Sources: Golf Channel, "'Mad Scientist' Bryson DeChambeau gets a little help from AI," June 2, 2026. Irish Golfer, "How Bryson DeChambeau used AI to fix his swing," June 2, 2026. Yahoo Sports, "'Something Your Mom Tells You': Bryson DeChambeau's Controversial AI Move Gets Brutally Mocked by Golf Analyst," June 2, 2026.
Written with AI in the loop: my idea, AI drafted and sharpened, my judgment on the way out. Every word is mine to stand behind. — Darren