Mike Ritland

Mike Ritland’s own channel bio is the short version: he spent 12 years as a U.S. Navy SEAL, seeing action in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and his service included work with military working dogs that became the rest of his career. After the Teams he founded Trikos International, which provides protection dogs and K9 training; Team Dog, his dog training community and food, treats, and supplements company; and the Warrior Dog Foundation, the nonprofit he created to care for retired special operations working dogs — a mission he has said, in his own episodes, he deliberately keeps at a scale where the work stays hands-on.

The channel itself is not, despite the brand halo, a dog-training channel. It is the Mike Drop podcast: 300-plus long-form conversations in which SEALs, Delta Force operators, Rangers, Night Stalkers, law enforcement officers, and K9 handlers tell their own stories — selection, deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, leadership and accountability, PTSD and the transition home. Ritland’s craft as a host is elicitation rather than lecture; the knowledge in this library sits with the guests, and SGV keeps it there, attributed to the named speaker of each episode. Around the interviews sits a faster layer — short story clips cut from the conversations and his “A Navy SEAL Reacts” commentary on current military and geopolitical news, which is his analysis and opinion, presented as such.

The recurring frameworks the guests return to are consistent enough to name. Selection is a mental test disguised as a physical one — BUD/S and Delta selection alike are described, by operator after operator, as decision-making under ambiguity with rank and identity stripped away. Leadership is accountability you carry afterward; Ritland’s own most personal recurring account is of a personnel decision he made as a platoon leader whose consequences he still publicly carries. The dog is a teammate, and losing one is a combat loss — the K9 stories are a minority of the catalog by count and its emotional core. And on PTSD and transition, the channel’s through-line is that the injury is real, institutions often mishandle it, and recovery runs on discipline, faith, and program, in that order of emphasis.

Disclosure: Ritland sells Team Dog food and training, Trikos protection dogs, and Mike Drop merchandise, and reads podcast sponsors on the show. SGV presents his businesses as his, his commentary as his opinion, and his guests’ war stories as their own accounts — not independently verified reporting.