Chris Ruden
Professional Speaker on Culture and Change · World Record Powerlifter
Chris Ruden is an amputee, world record holding powerlifter and professional speaker on culture and change. He competed on Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's Titan Games and has delivered hundreds of keynotes around the world helping organizations build cultures people brag about.
Reviewed November 2026Chris Ruden is an amputee, world record holding powerlifter and professional speaker on culture and change. He competed on Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's Titan Games and has delivered hundreds of keynotes around the world helping organizations build cultures people brag about.
On The Ryan Vet Show, Chris Ruden talks about the label he believed for nearly two decades and the idea he teaches now, radical curiosity. He was born with two fingers on his left hand and a shorter left arm, and he says he hid it for more than 17 years, until he was 27. What did the damage, he says, was not the insults. It was that he believed them. He describes how a difference gets collapsed into a defect and how a person then spends years confirming it.
From there he turns to teams. He says certainty gets mistaken for competence, and the higher up an organization you go, the less curious people get. His test for a team is not "does it work?" but "is it optimal?", and his sharpest question is whether someone has 30 years of experience or one year of experience repeated 30 times. His practical suggestion is to start one meeting a week with 10 minutes on what the team might have missed.
Ryan Vet brings the generational lens, and Chris offers a way through it. Ask how, not whether, and strip a judgment about a generation down to facts. They also cover AI and curiosity, parenting a kid who meets someone who looks different, and what a new graduate should be curious about. Chris describes competing in powerlifting, winning a first bodybuilding competition against non-disabled competitors, and the video of him taking his glove off, which he says reached 7 million views and led to a call from the Titan Games.
It wasn't necessarily the insults that hurt me. It was the fact that I believed them.
Do we have 30 years of experience? Or do we have one year of experience repeated 30 times?
We're not really stacking experience, we're stacking time.
Who is Chris Ruden?
Chris Ruden is an amputee, world record holding powerlifter and professional speaker on culture and change. He competed on Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's Titan Games and has delivered hundreds of keynotes around the world helping organizations build cultures people brag about.
What is radical curiosity, according to Chris Ruden?
It is his name for getting more curious about the things you think you already know. He says it starts with a better question rather than a better answer, and his go-to question is "how might we?" He says the word "might" gives people the psychological safety to say something without needing to be the right answer.
What does Chris Ruden mean by "30 years of experience or one year repeated 30 times"?
He uses it to test whether a team is still learning. When people say they have 30 years of experience, he asks whether they have 30 years of experience or one year of experience repeated 30 times, because a lot of the time people stopped learning and just kept doing. In his words, "we're not really stacking experience, we're stacking time."
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