Lyndon B. Johnson and the Articulate Balance Between Confidence and Arrogance
Your boss calls his penis ‘jumbo,' and he's been known to whip it out in front of not just visitors but reporters. He is even less shy about it in the bathroom. Anyone unlucky enough to be in the stalls when he goes to do his business will see his business – outside of the stalls too. How would you respond if your boss stopped in the parking lot in the line of sight at the front door and took a piss where everyone could see him? Or worse, what if you happen to be walking by and he grabbed your shoulder so he could use you to shield himself from the crowd? If your boss was a manager of Costco, the answer is easy - lawsuit. Or, if your boss is the President of the United States, what then? What if it was your job to have your pant leg soaked in urine? What if it was your job to conduct interviews with him in the stalls while he did his morning glory?
Lyndon B. Johnson had an arrogant streak, but it worked for him. Between his folksy draw, his goofy, down-to-earth jokes, and his frat-boy antics, he seemed to get away with a whole lot. He even called his penis jumbo and showed it to anyone he could. It might have been because it was the 60s, 15 years before the term ‘sexual harassment’ would even be coined, but it was still pretty damn weird. That is probably why so many biographers are keen to mention their personal encounters with jumbo. LBJ would also drive in the lakes with passengers screaming in the car next to him without telling them it was an amphibious vehicle. He was known to go cruising in the hills with a cooler full of beer and let the secret service just try to keep up.
But Johnson wasn't insane. He was arrogant - the winning kind of arrogant. Like Babe Ruth, LBJ called his shots long before he made them. When 20% of Americans thought Vice President Lyndon Johnson might have conspired to have JFK (his boss) assassinated, the press pointed out that LBJ had said from the very start that his best shot at becoming President was over another President's dead body. And once he became President, he let it be known that he intended to beat the Franklin D. Roosevelt record for how much legislation he would pass, which LBJ was extremely arrogant to attempt. Except, throughout his Presidency, LBJ would actually do it. The crazy old man, waggling jumbo at visitors and the calculating statesmen who won the Presidency are two men not mutually exclusive, and they came bundled in one extremely arrogant package. - pardon the pun.
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If you've seen the show Naked and Afraid, you know what arrogance will get you if you can't back up that swagger with skill. One moment, you're telling the world you’re ready to kick nature's ass, but the next you’re crying on top of a nest of fire ants, begging the camera crew to take you home. In past episodes, we've covered how ego and narcissism can lose you everything and how self-awareness and social conscientiousness aren't just squares to fill out your self-care bingo card. They actually earn you more money throughout your lifetime. Well, on today's episode, we're covering arrogance - a sin that has landed so many first dates that it's almost an honorary virtue. And to expose arrogance, we've got three blustering myths to bust.
Myth 1: Let's define arrogance, shall we? How is arrogance any different from ego or narcissism? Are they all the same?
Joe: Todd, do you remember a period in time where people were going around quoting the movie Anchorman?
Todd: Yeah, one of my favorites. I've watched it about 700 times.
Joe: I think every guy friend I have knows at least 10 quotes off the back of their mind. But I think the real appeal of Anchorman, and please tell me if I'm wrong, it's that he's so unself-aware and arrogant. He's arrogant to the degree that we all wish we could be like. It looks like confidence, but he gets shot down and crumbled immediately so many times in that movie. That’s arrogance, not confidence. So that's what we're talking about today. We want to have the confidence that Anchorman has, but we don't want the arrogance. Now, I'm not saying that LBJ was the real-life version of Anchorman, but I would like to play you a call that makes it sure sounds like it. Have you heard of the infamous bunghole call?
Todd: I have not.
Joe: So, it's pretty common for the White House to bug their own calls nowadays. But back in the 60s, Nixon bugged his own calls, but that was different. LBJ was the first person to have a phone everywhere he went. He didn't have his phone bugged but did have it recorded on purpose. However, he wasn't listening to his own recordings because he wanted the world to know what his pants measurements and bunghole looked like; he was doing it because he really needed to hear his own voice. He would sit up in bed and read his own conversations and then sometimes would talk to his wife about his speeches. So that's the theory today. Hopefully, we can take the pieces of confidence out of arrogance and use it.
When we started the episode, I foolishly compared LBJ to Anchorman. Part of the reason I did that is because Will Ferrell, a very intelligent comedic actor, invented that character to connect with people who enjoy arrogance or think it's funny or charming. There's a reason everybody quotes Anchorman. There's a reason why LBJ designed part of his personality to connect with the common man. That is what today's whole episode is about - how do we take that little piece of whatever they managed to tease out of the American psyche and figure out why arrogance works so well.
Have you ever heard of the book The Charisma Myth? It's a really good book, and it's all about how to be more charismatic and what works on a primitive level. One thing they pointed out is that to be more charismatic, project power and warmth simultaneously. It doesn't necessarily have to be strength. It can also be social power. Now, whatever power you wield, couple that with warmth, such as being kind and helpful to others. For LBJ, he was a big guy with a big personality, but he also told jokes and was charismatic. This is the important part about arrogance - you couple arrogance with power and warmth, it feels like confidence. It comes off as a swagger but with charisma. And that is a potent cocktail.
Overall, there is not a lot of research about arrogance. They call it confidence, meaning arrogance and that is blended many times. The studies we do have about arrogance are mostly about classification and identifying arrogance. I think it's because when arrogance becomes narcissism or ego, then it becomes dangerous. Arrogance on its own gets ignored because it's fairly harmless until it crosses the line into narcissism. So, I did find one good classification system. The funny part is when I say there aren't many articles or studies about arrogance, this isn't even a real identifier. It's not like they studied arrogance and found these categories. They're proposing this. With that being said, this is actually pretty new cutting-edge stuff and comes from the University of Missouri. They took arrogance, and they chunked it up into three pieces.
Antagonistic Arrogance - It's the smaller percentage of people who do this, but it's the more dangerous category of arrogance. These are the bullies, the teasers, and those who denigrate others based on an assumption of superiority.
Comparative Arrogance – These are people who feel they are superior, yet they are not. This one is common.
Individual Arrogance - This one is the most common and the least harmful. It means that you think a lot about your own accomplishments. It's annoying, but it's mostly harmless.
From what I could tell from this article, I don't think LBJ clearly lands in one of these types of arrogance, mostly because he used his physicality a lot. And if he did brag, it was usually about what he was currently doing. So, it wasn't something far in the past and often he would brag about how he manipulated congressmen.
Myth 2: Arrogance and self-awareness can’t exist in the same person, can they? The awkward ‘one upper’ guy at the dinner party can't possibly know what he looks like from the outside. And it's not as if LBJ planned to swagger his way into the winner’s circle, did he?
Lyndon Johnson was a world-class political chess player. He was a few moves ahead of everybody in the white house. He had a dossier on everyone, especially every US senator. So, he needed to vote in certain ways. He was intimidating with his tall frame and stand over others, now named the Johnson Treatment. It sounds like he's torturing people, but he's just looming on them.
This is how we know that his actions were deliberate because he didn't do this to everybody. He learned the boundaries and how to butter up others. So, can we emulate that arrogance? Not to say that we want to seem harmless in how arrogant we are, but we walked the results, and we want to win, right? We want to be able to spot the difference because we can't get the results without identifying what is arrogant.
This comes from the University of Queensland, and they made an arrogance test. So, I'm going to read through names, and I would like you to shout it out when you're familiar with it. Nuclear fusion. Photons. Plates of Parallax. Centripetal force. Particle accelerator. Atomic number. Alloy. Ultra-lipid. Manhattan Project. For everyone who is sitting in their car, with their significant other nodded long, they just failed the arrogance test. Those are just made-up words. This is the test to see if you are overconfident or arrogant, and the arrogance part comes in the claim you make afterward. So over five experiments, Murphy and his colleagues investigated the pros and cons of confident demeanor.
They took people who had proven to be arrogant, made a dating profile, and asked other people if they would go out with the guy. It turns out that these statistically arrogant people were more attractive. Their dating profiles were seen as more active and confident, as long as it wasn't immediately obvious that it was just ignorance. They found that overconfidence sets you apart from my romantic competitors. If you appear confident, even arrogant, you simply throw off your rivals’ game.
Myth 3: Finally, why do people find arrogance so attractive? And if arrogance is attractive, how can we use it to our advantage? Even better, how do we spot arrogance for what it is - fake confidence.
Why do people find arrogance so attractive? It's not so much that you are phony. It's just that you stand a little bit taller than your competitors. You're showing more risky behavior, which makes you more attractive. Why did those arrogant assholes at the bar get a date? Because they inflamed their ego and overwhelmed their competitors. You're just simply going to win potentially because people of your same peer group didn't dare to get into the dating pool or get into the job pool as you were. The stage light is on you because no one else is willing to step up.
In follow-up studies, if it makes you feel any better, they found out that the overconfident groups were actually seen as arrogant over time. And once the people looking at their dating profiles dug a little deeper, they were thought of as unappealing. So, the arrogance got them the date, but the arrogance lost them the attraction in the long run. For people who are pompous and conceited, they might end up with a partner who's too good for them, and you can just blissfully assume your life worked out great because you're a beautiful genius. But if people figure you out, then it's pretty much over.
Now, let's give LBJ the benefit of our doubt. You don't become Vice President of the country and then the President by not knowing how to play the game. Not only did he pass more legislation than anyone, but he also saved the Civil Rights Act.
He had a vision, he wanted to pass more legislation and he wanted to create a legacy like no other president. And we know from one of our prior episodes that if you write down your goals, you're like 10X more likely to fulfill them. LBJ would obsess who we needed on his side who he needed to butter up to. He was willing to humiliate and push people to the limit for better or worse. He would threaten them, flatter them, or bully them. So, that kind of gives a little bit of a clear picture of why he was recording himself so much.
Lastly, when people told stories about former President John F. Kennedy's great female conquest, it made LBJ furious. He would slam his fist on his desk, saying he had more women by accident than he ever had on purpose. That could have been true as well. LBJ was known to have a lot of pretty women on staff in the White House. He even had a wife cheating buzzer installed underneath his desk so the secret service men would warn him if his wife was on the way. So that's something Clinton neglected.
Final Thoughts
If you've ever been on a date with someone who uses big words that they're clearly unfamiliar with, or if you've worked with a boss who's convinced they know better than their team, don't worry - arrogance only gets you so far in life. Once these self-deceivers are forced to put their skills on the table, the swagger will fall off them like a cracked coat of paint. But that's the trick to sorting out the arrogant from the confident. You must make them put up or shut up. Arrogant people depend on social politeness to not get called out. If you're the one calling them out, be prepared for a fight. One way to do this is by squaring your shoulders, standing your ground, and looking them in the eye; give them the full double-barreled discomfort of the Johnson Treatment.
Want to know how you can separate true confidence from arrogance fast? Arrogant people assume they will win because it's them, whereas truly confident people know their skills and preparation will help them win in the end. LBJ knew the difference between confidence and arrogance. He knew that when he acted arrogantly, it would be misperceived as confident. But LBJ also did his homework; he could back up that swagger. He put his skills on the table every single time, and it worked. LBJ set records in passing legislative changes, records that still stand today.
Feel free to be arrogant occasionally. It looks attractive to the opposite sex, and it can inspire a following. But be damn sure that you can back up that swagger with diligence and ability, or you might end up on the receiving end of the Johnson Treatment by someone who actually did their homework.