STOP Treating Low Testosterone As Depression: The 160 Reading Navy Doctor Refused | Tim Parlatore

28:15Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Everything's been studied for, well, for men. And then we have safety outcomes like the Traverse trial, which we'll link to. Right. They wanted to do a study, but they couldn't say what the study should be. They They wanted to do some test cases. They wanted to do a pilot program with a small group. What's the point? Why do we need to do that? And this was originally submitted in April of 2026. And does someone come back and say, oh, well, we should do a pilot program? Is that, how does the? So it goes through the staffing where a lot of people look at it and provide their inputs into it. And so that's where a lot of the internal discussions happened.

29:05And so there were a lot of these suggestions of, oh, don't go straight for this. Let's try to slow this thing way down and let's just do a pilot program. Let's do a study. Let's try to hold off actual testing for another couple of years. Gosh, that is just terrible. It's just terrible. And that's when the secretary looked at it and said, no, this is already well established by civilian medicine. We're doing it now.

29:35Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:You know, I just want to point out the obvious is that people will, I mean, you're a lawyer. Quite frankly, I don't know your political views, nor may I ever, but I do know that you're a lawyer. Right. And whether health, whatever anyone's political views are, health should be bipartisan and health should be available to all people. And if we don't focus on the wellness of our troops and their families, then it's a distraction if it becomes about something that it's not. Correct. And that's one thing that we constantly have to deal with is that anything that gets signed by the secretary gets viewed through a political lens and then gets opposed through that lens.

30:27You have the media that will go out, and I saw some reporters that the day the memo was signed, they started going on X asking for experts who would be able to comment on why this is a bad idea. But not we need experts to give us an analysis of this. We need experts to show us why this is wrong.

30:51Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And were there many experts volunteering that time? or? They found a few to come in and to try to say, you know, all sorts of things. And you've seen over the past couple of weeks, various articles come out. You know, I think there was one yesterday in the New York Times where they were saying that, you know, testosterone use increases aggression. And they had a case study of a single person who had bipolar and alcoholism to show that when he took testosterone that he felt more aggressive. Can I ask your opinion on something? Sure.

31:30Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Why, again, this is your opinion, but why would they do that? Meaning if someone was a really good journalist, then they would look at the data, or even if they're a great doctor, but let's just say they're a journalist, they would look at the data and they would go, you know what? Low testosterone is a risk. most of these guys are going to at some point in their career either a choose to be treated b are going to have low testosterone and three are going to be really symptomatic right why would someone go and pick just a rogue case there's got to be some underlying um driver because at the end of the day, it's kind of like if two parents fight in front of their kid, it's about like the fighting as opposed to the family unit.

32:23So this is one of the reasons, and this is my personal opinion, this is why I think podcasts are the future, because the legacy media on both sides of the aisle, you have to remember what they are. Okay. The media at its core is an entertainment business. And what they do is they make their money by selling advertising, and they sell the most advertising by getting the most viewers. And so media companies are going to get the most views, the most clicks, the most likes and everything by giving their particular audience what that audience wants to hear. And so if you're the New York Times, then your target audience are people that will click more and view more if you tell them Pete Hegseth bad.

33:13And then you look over at Fox News and Fox News, they make a lot more money by getting more people to click who think Pete Hegseth good. And so that's so ultimately you're not going to be able to get the honest truth, in my opinion, from the legacy media, because ultimately they're not as much as they sit there and talk about, oh, we're here to talk truth to power. We're here to hold government accountable and everything. No, they're there to sell advertising.

33:46Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:It's very harmful. Yes, they're there. But here's the thing. That's not new. So that's been the way that this country was founded. Okay. From the very beginnings of this country, the original newspapers were sponsored by the original two political parties. And so. I didn't actually. I don't think I knew that. Yeah, absolutely. The original newspapers and the New York Post was founded by Alexander Hamilton as a propaganda instrument of the Federalist Party. And it's the one that survives from that day, but there was the other one for the Democratic-Republican Party. And so what they would do is they would publish anonymous essays, largely Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, writing articles attacking each other and trying to show why whatever policy was wrong.

34:48So that's not new. That's how the media has been since the beginning of this country. So it's not surprising to me that anything that you do, you expect that certain outlets are going to go out there and try to find whatever they can to say that this is wrong. And if the exact same policy was put out by a different administration, if the last administration had come in and said, hey, this is science based, we need to treat testosterone. then the roles would be reversed. And you'd have, you know, the New York Times saying, trust the science. And you'd have, you know, Fox News saying, you know, this is some, you know, terrible plot by the left to try to hurt the fertility of the American military male.

35:40You know, either way, they're going to find some way to attack.

35:43Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So the listener or the viewer, do you think that they've gotten any more savvy?

35:53if they want to be. So the listener or the viewer, if they want to be more savvy, then they will go to podcasts.

36:03Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Where the person gets to speak unfiltered. The people that are listening right now are listening not because they want to hear a certain result about what they think about the administration. The people that are listening to you right now want to learn about the science and the medical truth. And so that's why they're listening to you as opposed to primarily consuming from, you know, from the mass media. And if you look at every one of these outlets, they all have their distinct audience and people will get all of their media, all their information from that one source. Yeah, if you look at my phone, you will see that I have, you know, my news outlets on there.

36:48And so I read both sides. You know, when something happens, I will read the Fox News version of it, and I'll read the CNN version of it. And so if you read both of those articles about the exact same event, that's the only way you're really going to get closer to what the truth is about it. unless you can go onto a podcast and listen to somebody describe it, who is actually involved.

37:14Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I am hoping, which is why I didn't start out with your history. I'm hoping people have maintained, and I believe that our audience is open-minded, otherwise they wouldn't be listening for transparent conversations. I am hoping that they are listening to the science and the medicine because at the end of the day, administration's come and go. But our military members, our men, our young men, and our women, which we're going to talk about next, need appropriate care. And if everything is politicized, look at the Food Guy Pyramid. That changed. Finally. People would be like, oh, well, the Food Guy Pyramid changed And, yeah, it took 50 plus years to get any kind of change.

38:12Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And, frankly, it doesn't matter what administration is there. It matters because we care about our children, right? Anyone that receives federal funding. We care about nursing homes. We care about military, that they're getting good nutrition. And if it becomes about the parties, just like this. I mean, I see things out there, you know, that they're trying to make super soldiers and all of this other stuff. And I'm thinking, you know, those of us who've cared for military operators, we're not even talking about the super soldier. Correct. We're talking about an ability to live a life that is functional, period.

38:58You got to remember when you talk about the super soldier for the first 10 years, you're not even getting tested. You know, we're testing people starting at 30. So that's right. People will enlist at 18, 19, 20 years old. When did you enlist? So I joined the Navy at 19. I went to the Naval Academy is where I joined. So I was 19 years old. And so for me, they would not have tested me until I'd been in for 11 years. And so, you know, guys that enlist in the Navy or in the Army and they go through all the special forces training and everything else, and then they go operate. We're not making them super soldiers.

39:43because we're not even testing their testosterone until they've actually been in the special operations community or whatever it is for almost a decade. So that's another important piece. We're talking about taking more senior people and keeping them in the fight.

40:01Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:That's a really good point. Yeah. The next biggest criticism is what about women? So this is a very important point. we decided to start with testosterone because for two reasons one it's the largest population okay and when you say largest population um do you mean uh 98 percent of those that are on the front lines are uh male or less than 18 percent of the entire u.s military is female and and so you don't have to be just on the front lines. Again, what I was saying earlier about people on the ships, you know, this goes beyond just the special operations community. I mean, yes, when you're talking about ground combat, infantry, special operations, there women make up about 2%.

40:58Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:2%. Is it safe to say that those on the ground combat with low testosterone going into war are going to be at a disadvantage. Yes, absolutely. And that's why those guys, you know, particularly the older guys, unfortunately are either going and get it on their own or they're washing out. Yeah. I'm just concerned as a physician for the safety of our guys just want to know that if... Yeah. So first it's the largest population. Second of all, it is something that, you know, through Chris Free's work and others, we know that what we have done to them by putting them through this particular lifestyle is what leads to this particular deficiency.

41:45Okay. So it's the single largest population and it's a deficiency that the military has created. And so that is why it is the low hanging fruit to start with. But, you know, earlier I mentioned how we have, you know, the public memo that came out, which is the shortened version from the secretary. And then there's the underlying memo that there's that's attached and that they're using to implement this.

42:10Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Will we ever get to see that? Probably not, just because that's the pre-decisional piece of it. But one of the things in there is that the secretary wants to do is, yes, we are including women in this. We are including, let's figure out how to best test and optimize, you know, women as well. You know, the initial memo that went out about giving the annual testing, it was not gender specific. So yes, it does include women, but the goal here is to make sure that we're optimizing everybody, not just the men. But, and you can speak to this a lot more than I can, optimizing women's hormone health is a little bit more complicated than just, okay, low testosterone.

43:02Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:But what I'm hearing you say is that the original memo, which no one has seen for the most part, is generated, written, which is written and included with experts, world-class experts that are familiar with military operators, that are familiar with nutrition, that are also familiar with... It was drafted by a lawyer with massive input from medical professionals. But I just want to clear up... It does not rely upon the medical knowledge of a lawyer. Okay. But I want to clear that up because then what is then out there with all this loud commentary is that it's framed in one way, but actually the memo, the actual document says one thing versus.

43:55The initial implementing step is to mandate testing for testosterone. But the larger program is to do much more comprehensive optimization for everybody's.

44:13Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Well, that certainly isn't what we're hearing in the media. And also, I think one thing to note is that well-meaning physicians might misinterpret that. For example, some of my fellow female physicians, because they didn't read the memo, nor would I expect them to, are then making statements based on hearsay, which for then other female physicians, other people, it's almost as if only the men are going to get tested and treated when that's not at all what I'm hearing is indicated. Well, the New York Times did ridicule us for saying we're going to test females for testosterone, but yes. And it's fair to say that androgen therapy is not well studied in women.

45:06Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:No. All of those things are fair, but that's not really what the goal of this is. it's not about making masculinizing women. No, definitely not. Because there's a huge gap in what is going to be implemented or what is now implemented, right? The memo is signed. And then if someone chooses, is it optional? Can you speak to a little bit about the details? Yeah. So this is one of the things that came out of the COVID vaccine. the secretary is violently against mandatory medical treatment. He believes very strongly that people should have their individual choice on that. So if somebody tests low for testosterone and they want to be low testosterone and they don't want to, and to be clear, it's not just about, you know, you test low and, you know, you either get TRT or you don't.

46:09And I defer to you on this. There are a lot of different treatment options available to them. There are. And so whether it's TRT, whether it's in Clomaphane, whether it's they're slightly low and so they can make some lifestyle adjustments.

46:24Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Or Clomid or HCG, depending. There's so many different options out there that ultimately it requires a service member and a trained doctor to sit down and discuss not only the test results, but also other biomarkers, also what their symptoms are, what type of effect it's had on them and what their lifestyle is. And so what they then individually choose is best for them. And if they individually choose like, hey, I feel fine. I don't need anything. Okay. That's their choice.

47:07We're not going to say COVID vaccine is now optional, but testosterone is mandatory. That's not at all how he looks at things. The reason why Chris Free and I started talking about this was because a friend of mine had gone through this exact issue. He was a Marine and he had low testosterone. He was self-medicating.

47:32Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:With anabolics or? Oh, yes. Way too much anabolics. Not doctor monitored. It messed with his head. It did a whole bunch of things. Uh, and it, he was medically retired, um, from the Marine Corps and he was doing all of this stuff based on what the Jim bros told him. But ultimately he knew, and I, I spoke to him about this and he actually did say, um, that this is a low testosterone, you know, thing that he was trying to combat. And, uh, but it messed his head up. so badly to the point where he killed himself gosh after that and it was literally it was a month after i had talked to him about this exact issue and we we had discussed the self-medication piece of this and and so when he passed i said okay okay, I need to meet Chris Free.

48:38He and I, I need to talk to him.

48:41Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:How long ago was that? Two years. And so I need to meet Chris Free. I need to talk to him about this. And I got on the phone with him and I said, love your work, read your book, love it. but you know doctors are really great at doing research and coming to what the truth is lawyers may be better at selling it because you got to remember what is my job my job is to stand in front of 12 people with completely different opinions and try and get them all agree to agree on something. And I said to him, here's what we need to do. And I, and I kind of, when I told him about the idea of veterans and military members going to the gym bro to get anabolics as a self medication thing, because we always talk about self medication in terms of alcohol.

49:42Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I've never heard of that. I never have heard of that myself. We always talk about it in terms of alcohol, But when I said to him, self-medication with anabolics, he said, that's it. And this was, you know, well before the elections and everything. And we talked about it and we put together, like, how can we present this thing? And we were putting together a real plan on this that we were going to do no matter which way the election went. And, of course, when the election went the way that it went and we had Pete Exeth in the Pentagon such that I could very directly just sit down and tell him, hey, this is what we think, then it was something that actually we were able to operationalize.

50:33But it's – and again, I want to be very clear. I'm not a doctor.

50:37Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I went on TV. I don't want to pretend to be an expert at it, but I do know from my friend's experience, from my own personal experience, and from reading your book and others, I know enough to know this is a problem and this is how we can sell it. And this is how we can get the decision makers to say, okay, we need to do something about it. And the reality is, and again, you know this better than I do. If we do this now, if we optimize people's testosterone when they're at this age, yes, it's going to put a little bit extra costs on the Pentagon budget. How much money is it going to save? It's going to save on the, but on the backend.

51:29Right. How much money are we going to save in the VA's budget by having people healthier at this end? And obviously what we do in the department can set the standard nationwide. Because here's the other piece of this, is there's the research aspect of it to where when we are testing all of these people every single year, we can see the trends. and we're going to have a massive data set, anonymized, of course, for research purposes, but you can also then take that and put it against other markers that you're not going to have in a lot of these civilian trials because guess what else we're going to have?

52:10We're going to have their annual body composition analysis. We're going to have their annual physical readiness test or every six months rather. So you're going to be able to see on a chart as the testosterone goes down, the number of pushups they can do goes down. The speed at which they run a mile and a half goes down. And you're going to be able to see all of those things together. And then you're going to see, okay, now we've, we've put them on TRT. What does that do? That brings their testosterone up. Now their pushups have gone up. And so there's actually, you know, in addition to being able to help these individual service members.

52:50There's also a tremendous, you know, research opportunity here that, you know, Admiral Christine.

53:00Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Dr. Brian Christine, who's a urologist. Correct. He is very excited about this. Very excited. He called me up the day the memo got issued. He was, he was all pumped up for this. And because we're going to be able to do more lasting impact across the board by taking all of the research that's been done in the civilian sector, applying it in this very specified population, and then using the results of that application to then go back to the civilian population and say, look at this, you know, you've done the research to give us the science of what it is. We've done the implementation to show you how it actually significantly improves health.

53:50And now we can make it more of a nationwide thing. Do you think it's important to, and you might not, and this might not be the conversation for it,

54:03Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:but do you think it's important to address the pushback that people will say, well, What about fertility and what about X, Y, and Z? Do you think that that? This is part of the individualized choice that people have to make. And so whether they decide to use an alternative, a Clomid type of treatment, whether they decide to bank their sperm, one thing I can guarantee you. Pete Hegseth is not embarking on some secret plan to sterilize the American military mail. Oh, is that something that was said? I mean, it's not something that, you know, the fertility hasn't really become as much of an issue, I think, because I don't think anybody can look at him and the sheer volume of children that he has produced and say that he wants to sterilize the American military warrior.

54:58Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:On the record of saying he's not, his goal is not to sterilize. The goal here is by mandating testing first and then opening up treatment as something that becomes acceptable. That then it forces military medicine to get into the game, to actually focus on this, to actually learn about this, to start monitoring and then offering treatment. OK. Because we have to break them out of this idea that if somebody comes to you giving you all of these symptoms, asking for a test, that you can just simply say, oh, do you have erectile dysfunction? Nope. All right. Have a nice day. Do you think that this— Go eat less and move more.

55:44Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Gosh, that's been advice that hasn't worked. Do you think that I agree with you in that the military believes that this is performance enhancing? Right. An outside provider who's taking care of operators and special operations in particular for many years, I would say, and I think many of my colleagues would say, it's just a baseline overall health. You know, we're not talking about making super operators. They're already super themselves and they're going to push through regardless. But do you think that the military, and again, this is more your opinion, those in the military, do you think that they are going to say, no, no, we need this?

56:30Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, look, the pushback has all been from outside. There's no internal pushback. Guys are excited about this. I mean, particularly you look at the senior special operations guys who've been going outside and doing this. And needing it anyway. Yeah. Yeah. All of a sudden, OK, now the Navy is going to do this for me. Now the Army is going to do this for me. Now I don't have to pay extra out of pocket and then try to hide it. Because if the SEAL teams find out that I got a prescription that is well founded in science, well, you know, is completely safe. but I got it from you as opposed to the Navy physician.

57:13Now, if the teams find out, they're going to order me to go cold turkey. They're going to kick me out and everything else. We're allowing them to do it. I mean, and quite frankly, the biggest feedback that we've gotten from the force is, this is awesome. Can we have peptides too?

57:32Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I'll get to work on that. I'm waiting for the next memo. Oh, but you, why do you care so much? Loaded question. I'm not talking about your friend who lost his life, which is horrible. There's not one veteran that I know that hasn't lost someone to suicide. In fact, Shane was just sharing about one of the new guys that was on his team, which actually can we link to, I think that they created GoFundMe for his family fundraiser. So we'll link to it. Why does recovery get harder? Why do gains become more elusive? The truth is you can't train your weight completely out of aging, but especially out of aging muscle, you can slow it down.

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59:14Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Today, you can get an additional 20 % off that new lower price at timeline.com slash lion. Don't miss it. You went to Naval Academy, decided to become a lawyer. And had an unusual career trajectory. So my path of how I got here is very non-traditional, shall we say. Yeah, I went to the Naval Academy undergrad. I became a surface warfare officer. I spent three years on a guided missile cruiser. I then, you know, got off active duty. I went to law school, stayed in the reserves. and became a criminal defense attorney in New York City and ended up partnering with a guy named Bruce Cutler, who was...

1:00:07A legend. Yes. Famous for having defended John Gotti through three separate acquittals and earning him the nickname of the Teflon Don back in the 80s and early 90s.

1:00:20Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Teflon Don meaning nothing sticks. Nothing stuck to him. Nothing stuck to John. um to john gotty correct the biggest mobster allegedly allegedly um yes allegedly you uh the naval academy uh again from a perspective outside of say the military is a very honorable thing yes and i spent quite a few at least an hour trying to understand when I hear criminal defense attorney, as does everybody else, I'm assuming, I mean, I might be in my own world, defending someone who committed a crime to try to get them free or to get them off, which is incorrect. But it's like helping the bad guy. You know, this was why I had such a difficult time dating.

1:01:21I would go on so many first dates and, halfway through the conversation, so how can you protect bad people? I'm like, okay, this is not going to work out. Here's how I look at it. The Constitution protects everybody's rights. And we have a system of justice in this country. It is not perfect, but it is the best in the world. And it is based on the principle that everybody is innocent until proven guilty. The government cannot simply throw you in jail because they think you are a bad person. They have to prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And that system requires adversaries. It requires people to protect the rights of the accused.

1:02:10What do you mean adversaries? It's an adversarial system. And you have lawyers on both sides that are fighting it out and advocating for each opposite point. Because if we simply pick up somebody and we say, you know what, this is a terrible person. We should put him in jail. That's what they do in communist countries. They pick up somebody and they say, this is a terrible person because he spoke out against the party.

1:02:34Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:You could have picked anything, right? You personally, uh, could have chosen any kind of law. True. Why, why this one? It's exciting to me. Uh, it's a challenge. It is the highest stakes. Uh, and I think that one, one important point is I'm a private, criminal lawyer. What does it mean? So I am not a public defender. A public defender, they show up in court and the judge basically hands them people and they say, this is your client and they are assigned to you because they can't afford a lawyer and so you have to defend them. So that's the, a lawyer, if you cannot afford a lawyer, a lawyer will be.

1:03:16Correct. I've watched Law & Order. Those, you know, being a public defender is very important work. It's very difficult work. They don't get to choose their clients. I do.

1:03:29Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Meaning they could get a client that is either guilty or not guilty either way. Correct. It has to be evaluated. Correct. I, on the other hand, get to pick whether I want to represent somebody. You know, anybody who comes to me and says, I would like to hire you to represent me. You know, yes, there's obvious So you have financial negotiation, but it's also a matter of, do I want to represent this person? As a mentor of mine once said, the Constitution guarantees everyone the right to a defense, but it does not guarantee everyone the right to me. And so that's, you know, for me, I've gotten to the point in my career where I really can pick and choose whether I want to represent somebody or not.

1:04:15And so, yes, I have a high percentage of clients that are innocent. I have a high percentage of clients that have committed a crime, but not what they're charged with. And this is something the government does a lot, is that you may have made a mistake, you may have done something, but they will come in and they will say that you have done far worse. And so I don't always represent innocent people, but I usually represent people that are more innocent than the government claims. And so the reason why you have this system is to protect those people to make sure that if they are ultimately going to plead guilty, if they are going to go to jail or be punished, They have to be punished for what they actually did as opposed to what some government lawyer who's looking to make a name for themselves, looking to advance their career, has decided to inflate it up into.

1:05:17Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Your client list, and people can look this up, is many of them are very high profile. There was the Eddie Gallagher case. There was him and there was a handful of other people. So, you know, Eddie Gallagher was a SEAL who was wrongfully accused of having committed war crimes. And war crimes are usually homicide or. He was he was accused of murdering a prisoner and shooting innocent civilians in Iraq during the 2017 Battle of Mosul. He was innocent of those charges and he was facing life in prison. Gosh. And so I tried that case and he was found not guilty. So, you know, that's one of the big high profile ones.

1:06:08I represented the former commissioner of the New York City Police Department, Bernie Carrick. He was the police commissioner who led the response to 9-11 in New York City.

1:06:18Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:What was he allegedly charged or what's the right what is the right words to say? So he had a tax case, but that was before I represented him. I represented him after the tax case on certain civil issues related to it to really kind of put what he had been convicted of into context and to show that it was not something that he was not a criminal. He was a very good, good man who, sure, he made a couple of mistakes, but he was a very good man and a true hero. I've represented Donald Trump during the Mar-a-Lago and January 6th investigations. I represented three guys who parachuted off of the top of One World Trade Center.

1:07:22I represented a SEAL, a deaf group SEAL, who was accused of a hazing incident in Mali that resulted in the death of a Green Beret. I represented Matt Bissonnette, a SEAL who wrote the book about the mission to kill bin Laden and the fallout from that. I represent the first four-star admiral ever charged in a in a criminal case in a bribery case I've had a lot of a lot of very interesting and high-profile cases over the years

1:08:02Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:you have also been on Sean Ryan's podcast four times and you've talked about these cases some of these cases if you have a bad day, a guy like Eddie Gallagher goes to prison for the rest of his life. Correct. That is an austere condition. That is a, I can't even imagine. Um, you know, there's physical warfare and then there's mental warfare. Um, how do you compartmentalize that? I don't necessarily know that I'm good at compartmentalizing it because, you know, certainly, you know, my work does consume me. I do think about it all the time. I do come up with ideas for clients in the middle of the night and things like that.

1:08:56So I do not have one of those jobs where, you know, I leave work at the office.

1:09:02Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Do you ever think, what if I don't get this? So as opposed to, okay, I'm going to get this person off. One thing I've noticed about you is you're actually pretty positive. Eternal optimist. Yes. But it's very subtle. You would only know this if you talk to you. So you're aware of that. Yeah.

1:09:26So the most important thing to me right now of how do I deal with all of this stuff is starting out every single morning by picking up heavy things. I need to go and get into the gym. I didn't used to be like that. Um, I, for many years practicing as a lawyer, I focused on just lawyering. I was very bad at the compartmentalization. Uh, and I ate, I drank and I was a lot heavier than I am right now. And I had a case several years back. And I had just bought myself a, uh, an Apple watch. Um, I don't wear it anymore, but I, I had an Apple watch. It was the first time that I was in trial wearing an Apple watch.

1:10:21And this was fascinating to me. Um, and scary because I'm sitting there and I'm listening to the prosecutor give his opening statement. And all of a sudden my wrist starts buzzing and I look at it and it's flashing at me and it's saying, your heart rate appears that you're engaged in heavy exercise and yet you don't appear to be moving. And that's when I learned I needed to turn off the alerts on the watch so that the jury wouldn't see that. I later started wearing a continuous glucose monitor. And so I could see that when I was in the courtroom, my heart rate would spike high 160 180 my blood glucose would spike uh and you couldn't see it did you feel it no i didn't feel it nobody could see it I looked perfectly calm.

1:11:22I looked perfectly composed, but inside I was having that going on.

1:11:33When I got into shape and I got into hitting the gym every single morning, so I got rid of mental health reasons, not cardiac health reasons, but But the most recent case that I tried, I woke up early every single morning. I went to the gym. I lifted weights, got a shower, put on the suit, went straight to the courthouse from the gym. And during that trial, my heart rate never spiked at all.

1:12:03Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:That's very interesting. But to be fair, also, your diet is better. Yes. Oh, everything is better than it was back then. Can we show a before picture? Sure. Of you? Sure. Because you are a patient of the practice. Yes. And you've lost like 60, 70 pounds? Correct. I have another 15 to go. I think you're doing really great. I was in the gym this morning and Carlos was like, man, Tim's a big dude. He's like. Used to be bigger. No, but I mean six foot. Yeah. You know, you're six foot, six foot one. Six foot, about 235. right now. I mean, just a large presence. That would be really difficult. I can't imagine you 70 pounds heavier, also having to think as fast as you do.

1:12:57Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So you're, you're fitter. Yes. I can't say that you're calmer because you, I didn't know when you were 70 pounds heavier, but. I appear just as calm, but internally I am calmer. Hey, that's great. I'm just not faking it anymore. Okay, well, that is extraordinary. And you found, do you think that it was, it's kind of like the disbursement of energy that you go, you train, and then you go to the courthouse? You think that it's allowing you to, I don't know, think better get out the frustration because you didn't say that you were um taken off your game when the the thing is alerting you're you're like oh my heart rate's 180 because i never noticed it before yeah it had been doing it the whole time i just never noticed it have you ever gotten yourself in a position where you were you thought yourself oh my gosh what freaking out like me on a any given Tuesday?

1:14:05Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I'm just kidding. I don't really freak out. Mostly. Yes. It was, it was a very unique circumstance. So, and I'll tell you exactly what happened. So when I was representing Eddie Gallagher, part of this was big news at the time. Part of it, you know, we haven't really told this story. So, um, I had the prosecution tied up in knots. They were like every move, I was always one move ahead of them and they panicked. And in my opinion, and the prosecutor decided to cheat. Um, and so what he did was he got together with NCIS and they hatched a plan to attach a tracking beacon to my emails to try to spy on the defense's emails.

1:15:04Totally illegal, completely illegal. And so he did it and I got the email and because I had my settings up right, I recognized the tracking beacon instantly. and so I immediately emailed them back and I said, hey, you might want to go check with your IT department because I see that you have an email tracking beacon on this. I can't imagine you would do something so unethical as to put a tracking beacon on an email to me, so why don't you check to make sure that your system hasn't been compromised?

1:15:43I found out after the fact in discovery that he immediately forwarded that email to 10 CIS with the words, shoot, he found the beacon.

1:15:57Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:What is CIS? Naval Criminal Investigative Service. And so all the other lawyers in the case thought I was nuts. They thought, you know, no, there's no way that a prosecutor would actually do that. I can't believe that. Um, and so, but I kept pushing on it. And then we had a, did you just have a feel, it wasn't just a feeling. It was something alerted you. So there wasn't a moment where, Oh, you misinterpreted. I knew what it was. I knew exactly what it was. And, um, I was leaving it open to the possibility that somebody else had put it on there, but I knew exactly what it was. And so I kept pushing it and pushing it.

1:16:44And then we got onto a conference call with the judge. And the prosecutor said something that caused all of our blood to run cold. He says, I am only authorized to state that an investigative step was taken in coordination with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of California.

1:17:09Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I don't know what that means. What it means is that he's a Navy prosecutor, and what he was saying is that he did something in coordination with the U.S. Department of Justice that was a criminal investigation targeting me. And so now I am under criminal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. That's what he said. Mm-hmm. Yeah. He didn't say it in those words, but he said it in the words that somebody like me knows what it means. And so we get off the farm. And of course, all the other attorneys on my, on my team who thought that I was crazy up to this point are now absolutely terrified because they realize we're all under criminal investigation.

1:17:56So they're all definitely freaking out. I went out into my back porch and I just sat there and, um, yeah, my wife probably remembers this, uh, cause I just sat there and I just needed a little bit of quiet and I just needed to think. So I sat there for about 10 to 15 minutes and, um, Um, and just, just tried to quiet my mind. And then I looked at my phone and I saw, um, that the client's wife, Andrea Gallagher, had just posted something on Instagram. And it said, you know, that, that famous saying, you know, fate whispered to the warrior, you cannot withstand the storm. The warrior whispered back, I am the storm.

1:19:03okay, I know what to do now. In that moment, I knew exactly what to do, and I counterattacked, and I went straight to the head of the U.S. Attorney's Office, the chief of the criminal division. I went straight to the chief judge at the Southern District, and I just started going at them to say, you know, if you're doing this and just start showing why this was an illegal thing. And you know what they did? They said, we cannot confirm or deny the existence of any investigation, which is true. That's what the GOJ policy is. They never admit or deny. He says, but, and because I tied him up in a specific legal ethical thing where if there was an existence of a conflict of interest that would put me in conflict with my client, they would be required to disclose it.

1:20:03And he said, but we can disclose that we have not taken any part in the process in USV Gallagher. And that was, again, it wasn't explicit, but it was enough to where between the lines, I understood the message was this prosecutor lied. There is no criminal investigation.

1:20:29And so at that point, then it became much easier because at that point, okay, now there's no hammer hanging over my head. This was all fake. so I can put that to the side and now I can really go after this guy. And we went hard after him and he ended up getting removed from the case. Uh, he ended up getting forced, uh, into, into retirement. I think he should have gotten far worse than it. Um, but it totally changed everything in the case at that point. Um, because even at that point, even the, um, the case had gotten a lot of very partisan coverage. Um.

1:21:22Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Meaning both parties were covering it or. Yes, both parties were covering it and in different, you know, everybody on the right was very supportive of Eddie. Everybody on the left was, you know, condemning him. But that was the moment of pure bipartisanship where they're all, everybody got together. And like, even the ACLU got on board with it. And what's that? The American Civil Liberties Union. Even they got on board with like, hey, prosecutors doing this is not, you know, is not appropriate. And so we had that kind of, You know, moment of, you know, rare bipartisan support. And then I took that into the courtroom and just steamrolled this guy.

1:22:08And, you know, got the judge to list a whole bunch of things that this prosecutor had lied to him about.

1:22:15Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Did the judge know? At that point, he did. He didn't know. And then I went into court and I was very aggressive. and the judge you know judge actually told me afterwards he said you know you came in there Tim so aggressively that I was I couldn't figure out why I knew that there was something and then there was a certain document that when I handed up and he actually saw it and I could see it on his face where it all of a sudden he could understand the context and he had he realized what this guy had actually done because it had been, you know, it was being presented in a different light and everything.

1:23:00Oh no, nothing to see here. And as soon as he saw that, he realized, Oh, this guy lied to me about everything. And the, and the judge's demeanor changed like that. And yeah, he had been a pretty pro prosecution judge. And all of a sudden, because he realized that the prosecutor lied. He's like, all right, nope.

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1:24:57Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Code Dr. Lion for 15 % off. Bondcharge.com. For someone who doesn't understand, doesn't know law, Is it that everything that the American system stands for was completely disregarded? This is a common theme that I've had in a lot of my cases. My wife blames me for it, but I have a high incidence of prosecutorial misconduct where the prosecutors cheat. But it was something in that. Was it because it was Eddie Gallagher's life on the line? Or was it something so egregious? All of it. All of it. And so here's a common thing that I deal with, and it'll explain this particular point. Prosecutors, they want to win.

1:25:57Winning these cases is what gets them advanced in their careers, is what gets them, you know, recognition and everything. And when I come in and threaten that and threaten their ability to win, some of them are ethical and will do the right thing and will continue to play the case cleanly. And frequently those prosecutors will end up dismissing the case because they recognize the problems. Some of them are so afraid of losing and what the negative optics on their personal career would be of losing a case that they choose to double down and start cheating. And whenever they do that, because I've been doing this for a while, I've gotten really good at catching them.

1:26:47When they do cheat, I catch them. And then I use that as a bludgeon over the head to make things far worse for them and better for my client. Uh, and so, but that is, it's something that's happened a lot to me. Um, partially because I do aggressively defend my client. And so it takes people that would otherwise be, you know, okay, we can just go through the motions to, oh my God, I'm going to lose. Now I have to cheat. So, um, and that's what happened here. This prosecutor was afraid of losing. He had openly stated before the case that he believed winning this case was his key to getting promoted to captain and to becoming, you know, future admiral and stuff like that.

1:27:39And so, um, he wrapped up his future career prospects in winning this case, and the ethical rules state that a prosecutor's obligation is not to win, it is to seek justice. And a prosecutor has an ethical obligation to dismiss a case if they believe it is not supported by a probable cause, not to double down and hide evidence and cheat.

1:28:11Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So can a prosecutor, if they know someone is innocent, they is it uh they don't even have to know that they're innocent they just have to entertain serious doubts that they can prove the case and not only did they lie about evidence but they came after you right you personally correct in lawyer world that is not is that's not frequent no No, that doesn't happen very frequently. Because when it does, I mean, it seems to me that what he was doing to you is, and again, I am, it's almost like having a good surgeon's license pulled for no reason. Correct. Destroying someone's life, their family, their reputation, their career.

1:29:10Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Is that the equivalent? Absolutely. Absolutely. Horrific. Have you ever lost? Sure. Absolutely. How do you deal with that?

1:29:28By trying to find out how to fight the next piece of it.

1:29:34Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:But does it ever go away?

1:29:40I think it depends on the case. um yeah have i lost cases that i believe that i should have won yes are there innocent people in jail that shouldn't be there yes um

1:29:56do i sit there and say oh i you know i could have done this better i could have done that better it's my fault no because i know that i did everything that i could and as much as my wife may try to tell me you did the best you could. Nobody could have won that case, things like that. That doesn't make it any better. And so instead, what I try to do is I try to focus on, okay, how can we get this thing overturned? You know, what's the next step?

1:30:26Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So you move very quickly onto the next step for improvement. Correct. Do you think over time that is, you know, I just think in comparison to, say, the warfighter, there's just invisible wounds that these warfighters carry. Do you think that that also carries over for mental warfare? Yes. my profession has a very high incidence of alcoholism substance abuse and suicide um it may not be as you know sexy as the whole 22 a day thing for veteran suicide but yes there's a high incidence of attorney suicide, attorney, um, alcoholism, drug abuse. Um, and, you know, I would say that, um, you know, having done the type of work that I've done, having heard the stories that I've heard and having fought the fights for these people, um, you know, do, there's something called secondary trauma syndrome, which is similar but different from PTSD because you don't actually suffer the trauma yourself.

1:31:54But it's something that, you know, like psychiatrists, psychologists, and lawyers do suffer. And, you know, I take my clients stories very, very personally and very internally. You know, there are, there are lawyers out there that they will run a volume shop. And so like, if you're doing, you know, like anytime you're out there on the billboard, 1-800-DWI-LAWYER or whatever, those, those lawyers, they run a volume practice where it's just tons of DWIs one after another. and as one of these guys once told me there are no new cases only new faces and they don't even spend the time to really get to individually know the clients they don't need to because all DWIs are really very similar to one another um that's not how I chose to make my practice you know lawyers there's a couple of different business models that can be successful you can either take a lot of cases at a lower rate and therefore spend a lot less time on each one and just run them as a volume mill or you can take a lot less cases you can charge a lot more for them and then really dive into each one which is what I have chosen to do what others have chosen to do And so when you do that, you do get deeply involved in a case.

1:33:31You do get to know the family. And that comes with both the highs and the lows.

1:33:43Because I get the texts on Thanksgiving from clients who say, you know, I'm spending Thanksgiving with my family thanks to you. I am they'll send me pictures of their kids. Yeah I have a few of them where they'll send me pictures of their kids and they'll say I am home with my family and I have a kid because you successfully got me home.

1:34:12Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:That must feel really good. It does. It's obviously you know tempered with the you know, with the family members that will write to me and say, you know, my husband is still in.

1:34:30And, you know, it's, it's something that I've, I've tried to impress upon military commanders in particular, because not the highest stakes cases, smaller cases, administrative separations. One of the things that bothers me in the military justice system is that frequently we are picking a course of action based on the fact that the commander is angry at somebody as opposed to what is the right thing. And so if a commander is angry at some service member because they did something dumb. They think, you know, this guy embarrassed me and, you know, we're just going to try and get the stiffest punishment out of them.

1:35:24And, you know, the, the military lawyers, the Jags, they're trained to exactly that. They, you know, they go to school, they give them a fact pattern and they say, what's, what are all the things we can do to this person. And so they will go so far out of their way into, you know, whatever incident happened, we're going to get them an other than honorable discharge. We're going to, you know, screw them. You know, we're going to make sure that their record looks so that they never get hired again and things like that. All because they're angry at him, not because it's what makes sense. And, you know, and I've, I've had that incident where I then tried to impress upon commanders like, Hey, I know you're mad at my guy.

1:36:11I know you want this, but here's the thing. You don't know what I know because the moment that this case is done, he is off your books and you're never going to hear from them again. And so you don't know the human cost of what you're doing here. I do because I've represented these people.

1:36:32Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Do they listen? Some do. Some do, some don't. Because I tell them like, you don't get the call a year later. You don't find out that the consequences of what you do here is what leads to that person becoming homeless, is what leads to that person becoming a drug addict is what leads to that person committing suicide. I get those calls from the families. You don't. And it's something that I think that we could talk a lot more about when we talk about 22 a day. Which for the listener or the viewer is suicide. Correct. I believe that a good portion of veteran suicide is avoidable because of the way that the commanders and the military treats people, particularly when they are separating them.

1:37:27um the SEAL community is particularly bad at this and this is a this is a something that the current naval special warfare commander I believe is trying to fix but something that traditionally they have been horrible with this because if they have somebody that they're mad at they don't want to just kick them out no they want to destroy them retribution right and the and the best retribution that they come up with is a trident review board. And so as they're kicking them out, they will also remove their trident, their seal pen. And they'll say, not only are you no longer on active duty, but you're not one of us.

1:38:07Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Oh yeah. And you're never one of us. And so you get these guys with DD two 14s that say that they deployed 10 times. They have a, you know, they have purple hearts. They have bronze stars, but it doesn't say they were seal. and when they then get into trouble and they want to go to the Navy SEAL Foundation and say, hey, I need help, Navy SEAL Foundation looks at their DD-214 and says, nope, you're not one of us. And when you look at the aggravating factors of PTSD that leads to suicide, a feeling of abandonment. Oh, yeah. Well, and a lot of these cases are dumb. You know, they're not, we're not talking about like, you know, major felony cases.

1:38:57We're often talking about a dumb alcohol incident.

1:39:00Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Or drugs or, yes. And so many of those cases. Not that drugs are dumb, but yeah. No, but no. It's not homicide. It's not X, Y, Z. But here's the thing. Is it a lot of those cases, if you really dig down into the root cause, why did this operator decide to take drugs? Is it because they were self-medicating for something that happened to them overseas that we failed to provide them proper treatment for? It seems most of the time. Yes. And so if they're self-medicating for something that the service put them through, and then we punish them for that, and rather than getting them the help that they need, we actually change their discharge status to something where they're not going to be able to even get that VA care for it, then what do you think is the natural conclusion of that?

1:40:05Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I do believe with your voice and your advocacy that these guys are going to get better treatment because, you know, on the outside, being a operator is very glamorous. And this is what you see. And it might be, right? But just as glamorous as the movies are, again, in some ways, is just as damaging and dark. And I don't mean that in any – it's part of the job, you know, I would say. but if one side of it can be very glamorous and you know all these accolades and parties then you still have to address the underlying human right um other communities are not quite that like that you know aviation they have a very sophisticated process to take somebody's pilot away from them and they very rarely do it.

1:41:11And so if a SEAL and a pilot engage in the exact same conduct, they may both get separated from the military, but the SEAL is excommunicated, whereas the pilot still has his wings.

1:41:26Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Very excommunicated. Right. Very excommunicated, Which brings me to a last topic that I really want to get to. And that's being able to perform under scrutiny. And not just a little scrutiny, but you get a lot of scrutiny. And, you know, people will be like, oh, you have to be careful what you wish for. You hear these athletes that all of a sudden become famous or the actor all of a sudden becomes famous. but your level of scrutiny is different. Yeah. And I would say most people would be like, no, hard pass. How does one manage that?

1:42:17Well, first of all, this is not one of those careful what you wish for things. I chose this. Um, you know, when I went to law school, I wanted to be in the hottest fights. You know, I, I did not, I didn't go to law school to just, you know, make money doing, you know, mergers and acquisitions and stuff like that. I wanted to be in the hottest and most intense fights. and uh so i am grateful for it because this is exactly where i wanted to be this is exactly you know the level that i wanted to be at um a lot of the i mean a lot of the scrutiny honestly i've stopped reading most of the newspaper articles years ago because you know early in my career.

1:43:13It was amazing to me reading articles about my trials and realizing that the media is reporting something that I had just done in a courtroom that bore no resemblance to it. It's like, this is a room full of people. There was a court reporter that took a transcript of it and you're reporting something that completely didn't happen. Um, so I kind of, I've largely stopped even, you know, reading a lot of those articles. Um, because it's, you know, I know people are going to say whatever they want to say. And, you know, something Pete Hegseth always says to me whenever there's, you know, one of these hit pieces out there, uh, so he always says, you know, the hotter that gets, that's an indicator that we're right over the target.

1:44:11And if you're not making a difference, if you're not out there actually making an impact.

1:44:17Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:No one cares. No one cares. Exactly. So the more people are scrutinizing and attacking and everything, it just shows that I am doing what I need to be doing to make an impact and to do the best that I can for my clients. I don't lose any sleep over it. because ultimately, again, use Eddie as the simplest example, the more people that are angry at me for defending Eddie Gallagher, the more people that would send me nasty, threatening emails and all that kind of stuff, I helped an innocent man go home to his family. I sleep fine.

1:45:07Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Tim Parlatore, I am so honored to call you a friend. And you are the world's strongest lawyer. You just go on record of saying that. But thank you for everything that you do for the community and for the people that you care about. It is so necessary. And if no one has thanked you today. Let me be the one. Thank you so much. Thank you.