His eventual involvement in an industry—created by smugglers and international crime syndicates, and in which gigantic American zoos are also complic
His eventual involvement in an industry—created by smugglers and international crime syndicates, and in which gigantic American zoos are also complicit—started with a single turtle. Goode received his prized pet at age six, igniting a childhood fascination with the reptiles that morphed into full-blown obsession as he matured. “I had a room full of turtles and tortoises and snakes and lizards when I was a teenager in high school,” he says. “Eventually, girls trumped that for me for a while, but I went back to turtles and tortoises.”
With Nixon’s signing of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, obtaining exotic animals became more challenging, but also more valuable for those willing to break the rules. Men like Tommy Crutchfield, known as the “Lizard Whisperer” and as the reptile dealer who, as he boasts in the docuseries, before he pleaded guilty in 1999 to smuggling exotic animals (for which he served 30 months in prison), “supplied cobras for Indiana Jones, the alligators on The Johnny Carson Show. I sold some tortoises to Michael Jackson.”
As explored in Monsters of God, pop culture often drives demand for exotic and endangered species. “Jurassic Park had this crazy paradoxical effect on pet sales in the US. Finding Nemo made everyone want to buy a clown fish,” Goode explains. “When I used to travel in Asia 10 to 15 years ago, I would see owls in the marketplaces, and people would say, ‘Oh, those are Harry Potter birds.’” The more compact the animal, the easier to conceal. “The smallest ones, like turtles and tortoises, are among the most smuggled,” says executive producer Jeremy McBride, who has worked with the Goode Films’ Production banner for the last 20 years. “One of every five reptiles that we talk about in our show are threatened with extinction.”
Jeremy McBride and Eric Goode of HBO’s Monsters Of God, pose for a portrait during the Getty Images Portrait Studio at SXSW 2026 on March 13, 2026 in Austin, Texas.Robby Klein/Getty Images
Goode’s fascination with all things scaly led him to order reptiles by mail from wildlife dealers (including Crutchfield, he says) throughout early adulthood. But his growing awareness of the broader global wildlife animal trade, the fourth largest illegal market after guns, drugs, and human trafficking, led Goode away from the hospitality industry and toward animal conservation. In 2005, he formed the Turtle Conservancy, and today runs the Behler Chelonian Center, “a five-acre compound in Ojai, California devoted to the care and breeding of endangered turtles and tortoises,” reported The New Yorker back in 2012. Among the Conservancy’s volunteers? Josh and Benny Safdie, who, before becoming Oscar-nominated filmmakers, spent time there in the early 2000s. Years later, Josh, an executive producer on Monsters of God, reunited with Goode to film on the compound of Crutchfield, who still breeds reptiles, in 2014—the very place the team first heard the name Joe Exotic, the central figure of Tiger King.
