I was in the detective division. And I was watching the sheriff of this county. But the guy here was a snuff dipping, sit there with a cowboy hat on, he never had owned a cow in his life. And he had been the sheriff 15 years. And I thought, you know, he's a nice old man, but my God, this is an insult to my profession.

So I was talking to the district attorney one time, and he, and I said, Good God, this is really terrible. He said, we know that, but we can't do anything about it because the sheriff is elected in the state of Texas. So I went out and got me a job driving trucks and, but I announced that I was running for sheriff, and they laughed at me. A lot of people laughed at me.

So I contacted a guy here in Tyler that was in the advertising business named Dana Adams. And we had a few glasses of wine and he said, you know, really, you're no different than a can of beans. Advertising a can of beans. He said, when you go into a grocery store, Krogers, Brookshires, if you want a can of beans, you go to the bean aisle. Which one are you going to buy? The one that's been advertised. Every time.

I loved it, I said shit, let's get it. And we put this whole thing together, he and I. and we made J.B. Smith essentially a can of soup. And I got out there and I did something nobody else had ever done in Tyler, Texas. I started going out and standing in front of supermarkets, shaking hands, handing out my little cards. Nobody had ever done that. And I had a nametag on: J.B. Smith, candidate for sheriff.

When I announced they kept talking about, well, you ain't got a dog's chance in hell. I kicked his ass. I stood out in the, in the, in the sleet handing out cards. He didn't realize, and they said at the last two weeks before the election, he knew he had his ass stomped. And I did.

You know, there's people that make things happen. People that watch things happen, and people wonder what the hell happened. And I always watched the people that made things happen. And that’s how I learned.