Before Josh Safdie was an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, he was living in Eric Goode’s hotels with exotic reptiles crawling around in the bathroom. The two met through Glenn O’Brien in the early 2000s, when Goode—a nightlife kingpin, hotelier, conservationist, and eventual Tiger King director—hired the young filmmaker to make PSAs for his Turtle Conservancy. Soon enough, Safdie would be chasing down Christopher Walken and Parker Posey to pose with turtles, filming venomous snakes at dangerously close range, and generally doing whatever Goode needed done. Somewhere down the line, the two also started filming what would eventually become Monsters of God, Goode’s new five-part HBO docuseries about the cutthroat world of reptile smuggling in Philadelphia and South Florida. The project officially got started with Josh and Benny Safdie in 2014, before Goode made his late-career transition into television’s foremost chronicler of animal obsessives. With Monsters of God finally out in the world, we brought Goode and Safdie back together to reminisce about smugglers, obese monkeys, and Christopher Walken’s gym shorts.