The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Hope and Destiny: A Novel by Niklas Natt och Dag

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

Hope and Destiny: A Novel by Niklas Natt och Dag https://www.amazon.com/Hope-Destiny-Niklas-Natt-och/dp/1668069873 The author of the “thrilling, unnerving, clever, and beautiful” (Fredrik Backman) Wolf and the Watchman series presents a new historical series that takes us to medieval Sweden to unravel one of the country’s most infamous murder mysteries. 1434: The unified kingdoms of northern Europe are cracking at their seams as a peasant rebellion, led by the charismatic figure Engelbrekt Engelbrekts, erupts in the north. Sent by his family to find a foothold in this rising revolutionary movement is young Magnus Bengtsson, who must win Engelbrekt’s trust and favor no matter the cost. Back at Magnus’s family castle, his mother, father, and sister wait for news of his success. One is lost in longing, another is forging his own plan for the throne and crown, and one is looking for the opportunity to rise from her brother’s shadow.

You wanted the best... You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Because you're about to go on a moment. Monster Education Roller Coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks, and Voss here from the Cravoss Show.com. Lacey, I'm on there, ladies, things, and that makes official welcome to the big show. As always, we bring in the most smartest minds, the most brilliant stories on the show. The stories are the owner's manager to life, as we like to say, and, of course, people who find entertainment in them, they find great learning, find good education, is great escape sometimes,

and all those good stuff. So always refer to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to goodreads.com, Fortresschastchristch, Chris Foss, Facebook, Facebook, YouTube.com, foreshastchristch, Chris Foss, where it was just announced today, we hit 25 million views over there on the YouTube on top of the millions of downloads we have with the Chris Faw Show podcast. So congratulations to us, I guess, I don't know.

25 million seems small these days when it comes to viralness. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing young man on the show. We're going to be talking about his newest novel that's out December 2nd, 2025. Hope and Destiny, a novel, is out. You can pre-order it now, actually, and all that good stuff.

Not Ok Dog is on the show with us today. We're going to be talking to him about his book and all of his insights, and some of the things he's writing about. He's written several different novels, been very popular, et cetera, et cetera. Welcome to the show. Mr. Dog, how are you? I am fine.

I was a little bit apprehensive at the intro, talking about brainpower and so forth, but you're calling me a young, man made it so much better. We work up everybody in the show to make them feel good. We want our guests to glow. Perfect. So give us any dot-coms.

Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs to get to know you better? I do not exist on the internet. And I can be found playing with my children at the table tennis venue, close to where I am in Stockholm, Sweden. You mean you have a life? I love to see you there. You mean you have a life. you're not, you're not saying, looking at your phone all day long.

It's hard to avoid, but at least I'm not looking at my own social media. Ah, where, where are you ever going to become a narcissist with that sort of behavior? I have the best of genes from the start. I like, I like the fact that you're, you know, you're focusing on your family and your children as opposed to, you know, I see so many people look on their phones and, like I was out shooting yesterday, and there was, there was some kid walking around without a shirt, and I'm on a street, and I'm on a street. corner shooting people on a street corner where cars are blasting by and there's just a kid wandering around with a shirt off and I'm like, where's your parents? And they were over in the corner. Anyway, so give us, uh, it's just over here, unfortunately. Is there really? Not maybe short off this time of year, but, uh, but still the problem is over here too. Well, it's a dopamine

addiction sort of issue. I think we need to open some dopamine clinics. But let's talk about other forms of media people can get hooked on that people love reading books. Uh, tell us about your new book hope and destiny the story behind my uh hard to pronounce and uh horrible to use abroad last name which is not dog dog it means in swedish it actually means night and day it's it's a very old noble family from the 13th century wow the story in my family ever since i was a small boy you hear this whisper saying you know there's a killer in the family Yeah, and he killed, he was an axe murderer, and he killed the most famous man in Sweden. Really?

In the year 1436. I remember that, 1436. So this story has been around all my life. It's our main claim to fame, I would say. We're a good point. We murdered. The 17th century. Yeah, but he was famous, you know.

You make any money on that? of it that you can inherit down to you unfortunately not my my family sat on perhaps the largest fortune ever amassed in Swedish history until one guy inherited all of it at the very end of the 17th century and when he died there was nothing but depths left he had a he had a wild ride you should see that guy you should see that guy so now i have to write books and so forth to You know, my family loves genealogy, and so they're always like, hey, you know, you had like a king there back in, you know, 1,001 or something, who was a part of a lineage. And I'm like, did you leave me any money? And I'm like, no, I'm like, I don't give a fuck.

But no. Where was this king? I don't know. I'm just, they're always, it's always funny how when people either go back in genealogy, they try to find the rich, successful people. Or like, what's that thing that people do where you die and then you get, oh, reincarnation. You know the reincarnation people? They're always like, they're never a peasant in like, you know, 1700s or something. They're always like a king or a queen or something.

There are many, many, like, patients in asylums who claim to have been Napoleon in a former life, but very few who claim to have been like a pauper with leprosy. Yeah, yeah, which more likely was possible. But, you know, besides, I was in the polly in my previous life. We all know that. Sorry. Is this story, like historical fiction that you've told in the book about this story from your families? Yeah, yeah.

I try to make, I mean, I'm a novelist, so I'm in show business. But I try to take a look at that story that's been around as long as I can remember and try to see if there's, if there's a story there worthy of retelling in a fictional form. And I looked at the facts around this murder, which, I mean, a lot of the details are well known, but what remains unknown is the motive to the murder. And historians, they can't speculate. That's like a big cardinal photo there. But as a novelist, that's my prerogative, so I can try to connect the dots any way that I feel fit. and that's what I tried to do. So give us a rundown on who these characters are. Tell us about some of the characters, if you would, they're in the story.

Yeah, so in the early 14th century, the black death has more or less ravaged Europe, killing about half of the entire population. Sweden has become like a vassal state to demonstrate, mark. And the Danish queen has put a lot of her own knights in the castles. So you have kind of Robin Hood-esque situation where they are foreigners who do whatever they can to make a living and earn a fortune of the poor Swedish population. At the same time, the Swedish nobility are severely pissed off that they are not the ones sitting in the castles exploiting the people

anymore. Among them, we find my ancestors. So a rebellion breaks out, a peasant rebellion who's led by a guy called Engelbrecht, and my ancestor eventually murders this guy with an axe. Oh, wow. After having been one of his closest associates, there in lies the mystery. What went wrong?

what went wrong and so why did they get the axe i mean sometimes that's the only way you can break up with people i'm sorry no i'm just teasing people don't write me uh don't do that and so you tell the story i mean it sounds like maybe over the ages you quite had quite the big family and lots of cousins was that kind of how your family worked where you're like yeah that person's a cousin mine you know hundreds of years cousins right back in the day i mean back in the in the dark ages It was a clan society. Oh, really? So you have your families, your noble families, which has a crest of arms.

In our case, for your reviewing pleasure, it looks like this. Okay, cool. The name house night and day became the name eventually. Wow. So you would have that on your shield, and everybody belonging to that family will do their best to sort of get as close to the throat. as possible there you go it looks like somebody build it on the

this is on the cover of the book Game of Thrones without Dragons was the review they gave to your book Hope and Destiny it feels like that blurb goes with any kind of historical fiction these days that doesn't have dragons but I'll take it sure yeah I suppose you could put Game of Thrones

I'm a fan of George R. Martin I'm one of these guys quite impatiently waiting for the final installments. Actually, a lot of people are, aren't they? Funnily enough, my first publisher was also

George R. Martin's publisher. He was hosting George here in Sweden. And he hadn't really done his homework on where George was at at the moment. So he started like, started the conversation by saying, so when is your next

book out? and the sort of it went very icy from there but George in his turn has been very vocal about being inspired by a series of French novels written by a guy called Maurice Duon

who was a member of the French Academy Oh yeah Maurice and he wrote I think a seven part series on the the royal houses of France when they tried to compete for power They were cutthroat bitches, one and all.

Wow. So he was inspired by that, for sure. I'm, of course, none of us can escape the cultural impact of his work. Oh, yeah. But no dragons, alas. No dragons, nonetheless. Now, do you see this as a series coming up? Is there going to be more?

We'll talk about your series that you have here in a second. But do you see this book launching into a series? I... I signed a two-book contract and I've finished the second of the sequel, which is, to my mind, it's the end of the story about these characters in that day and age. But I plan on perhaps continuing the series somewhere else in time. I've always been very envious when I find a writer who's found, you know, who's created a universe where they can do like whatever the hell they want. And I would like to do that, so I'll probably change the setting. Well, that'll be nice.

Now, you may have done that in your other books. Tell us about the, I believe these are a series, aren't they? The 1793 Wolf and the Watchman, a trilogy. Yeah. Tell us about this. Yeah. It's a trilogy of more or less, like, detective fiction set in late 18th century, Stockholm, which was like a period of time that fascinated me.

I mean, the first one was my first published novel. So that's, I mean, that's the life-changing one when your lifelong dream of being a writer finally sort of came true after a five-year period of being rejected. I don't mean to laugh, but I mean, it's interesting what you go through when you get rejected for a book and then you finally hit it and you get to kind of laugh at all the people who rejected you and be like, showed you, I told you I was going to be good. I don't really feel that at all, actually, because it was a blessing in disguise, really. Because, of course, I mean, I made a living as a freelance magazine journalist doing

celebrity interviews and stuff. So I had made my living from writing for, you know, 15 years before actually trying to do something. And of course, there's this part of you that when you're finished with that first draft, that's good enough. to send away to a publisher some little monster inside you are thinking wow this is perfect this is just a flawless diamond could not possibly be improved upon i think some editor may change a comma or two maybe and i'll even take that fight and then you get in sweden you get the sort of auto rejection you submit your manuscript three months after that you will get Three months after that, to the second, you will get an email saying, well, thank you for your interest.

No, thanks. Please note that this email cannot be replied to. And then you get to try again. And first, you need to read your stuff, trying to understand what was wrong and what you could do better. So I tried, and I took another year. And then I sent it out again, and I got the better time of rejection. That is when the publishing houses have some poor schmucks that they employ to actually read manuscript on must. So somebody, some poor guy actually had to read the whole second draft and submit a report.

And even though they choose to reject it, they will show you the courtesy of giving you that report. So you will have your first. It's a huge favor. Yeah. Because then you kind of know what, okay, maybe these are some things that can work on. This is a good lesson for writers. The guy could be wrong, of course, but you need to, it's a huge favor nonetheless. So I had quite a few of those.

They were all in agreement as to what were. Oh, really? There was a consistent pattern you saw. Yeah. Which made it all the more easy for me. And so you feel it helped shape you, kind of help tone you. Kind of like, you know, I always use the example of the blacksmith and the anvil, you know, where you, where you temper steel, you know, you hammer on it to make it stronger.

And, you know, that's a good lesson for life and a good lesson for authors out there. I've had a number of authors like yourself on the show that have gained success. But, you know, they went through those failures. They went through those droughts where they were like, should I really be an author? Do I really have it? Everyone's rejecting me. And it made them their work better. And, you know, sometimes that's the necessary thing that helps.

shape us into better into better people or better, you know, or where's what we're trying to do, that hammering the anvil. It's impossible to do a rewrite of something you've written without making it better, basically.

And this whole ordeal showed me the difference between the first draft and the seventh draft, which was eventually what made it out five years later. And I'm so great that it wasn't the first draft that came out.

And that's a great lesson because we have a lot of aspiring authors that listen to the show and people that are trying to figure out. How did you know when you, when did you start writing, you know, even in maybe your youth, when did you start writing and when did you kind of know that you were, this was something you wanted to turn into a career? I have the same sob story as every author that I've ever met, which is that I was a lonely little kid who felt, you know, different. I had a lot of free time on my hands. There weren't cell phones around back then, so people like you and I had to resort to different measures to further the passage of time. Reading was one of them. Yeah. So I turned to books.

What were... Sorry to interrupt you, but what were some of your favorite authors and genres that you got into? This was like the Lord of the Rings era. Yeah. It was the big one for me in my... I was like 10 or 11 or something when I first. And I remember my parents took me to Greece for a vacation. And in this period, it was a completely unknown fact that there's a connection between skin cancer and the race.

and the rays of the sun. In Sweden, it's huge status to have a tan because we get very little sunlight up here. So as a kid, you would sort of be ushered out into the sun. You need to look like a gingerbread man when we come home. Otherwise, the neighbors will, you know, question whether we even went to Greece. And all I wanted to do was finish the return of the king, which is the final part of the Lord of the Lord of the Lord of the king.

So I was out in the sun finishing this. I got burned to a crisp and I had this, you know, I have this horrible fever where I had to lie shivering in my hotel room and it was the greatest reading experience of my life because I was like hallucinating that whole world. Wow. As I read. But anyway. Sounds like you got, what is it called sunstroke? I've had that before. Yeah.

Oh, that's hell right there. You should. Oh, yeah. I got it as a kid on my dad's job site. I was out in the sun too much, and, and, uh, and, uh, I got sunstroke. And I've had it, I think once, one other time when I was a kid and, wow, it was bad, man. It was like the worst. You got the spins, I think.

Yeah. It was like being drunk. Yeah. Just not as fun. I don't know. Indeed. Yeah, but I know that those luscionations are like. I'll never forget the sunstroke, man.

I was, my world, I was, I was spinning out. I was getting the spins really bad. You should have read something really good. Yeah, yeah. Profited of it. But it wasn't the finest hour of my parents right there. Drop some edibles. That's how my parents, that's how my family was, too.

We lived in SoCal, and so there was kind of like this initiation process to the summer and going to the beach all summer long. Because when we got to school, we had this camper VW van. And so my mom, you know, because we were two boys driving her crazy, we would go down to the beach in Santa Monica and play on the beach, and she would, you know, we could always change and she could cook stuff in the little camper thing there. And

yeah, every summer we would do this initiation where we'd go down and get burnt to a crisp, you know, and that would be, that would turn into the summer tan. But we have we have those three days of agony

where, you know, your skin's peeling and, you know, you're glowing in the dark. It's these days we'll never know that wonderful feeling. Oh, yeah, ski cancer, you know, it's whatever. Anyway, so you,

you, when did you finally realize this was kind of like your thing? You were like... Right. Then and there, I felt from reading, it sort of cured me of loneliness, I would say. I felt I felt

that I had a very, very intimate relationship with all these men and women who were nowhere near my age. damn many of them, but it was a real relationship. I can hear their voices in my head by reading what they had written. So from a very early age, it was obvious to me that being a writer is for sure the best thing you could ever aspire to be. You can be a company to somebody who has none. So I wanted that from being a reader. But it took me, I mean, I had nothing to write about.

So it took me many, many decades to finally figure out what I wanted to write. Well, that's awesome. That's awesome. You know, most people don't find what they want to do in life or what to do with their life. So, yeah, pretty amazing. And then, so you, in this series that you have that you wrote, the 1793, 1794, 1795. And is this kind of a similar sort of genre?

Or where did you get the story from in this book, The Wolf and the Watchman? When I finally started thinking to myself that if I'm ever to be a writer, I think the time is now. I was married, but we were thinking about starting a family, starting to try for it. So I thought that, I mean, feasibly after having children, time will be scarce, and this would be something that i had to do on you know evenings and uh and uh weekends um so i felt time was short i basically took a good look at all of the books that i had really fallen in love with in my lifetime and try to think if there's something similar that i could try and among those there's a book called the name of the rose by

an Italian gentleman called Umberto Ecco. It's also a it's made into a kick-ass movie with Sean Connery. Name of the Rose, possibly his last really good movie, actually. It's a medieval

it's a genre mix, so it's a murder mystery, but it's set in a monastery in I think 12th or 13th century. and to me I read it multiple times but I remember reading it as a child and it was a roller coaster ride

of a mystery, loved it and then I read it as an adult and I couldn't believe how much history he had managed to sort of layer into that and I was amazed that these two dimensions could coexist without one taking the upper hand so

I'll just check this movie out I never ever saw it before. The name of the rose. It's really good. It's actually Christian Slater's first movie. Yeah, I was just looking down the list here. And he has a nude scene in that.

Since he's only 17, I think at the time, it's technically child pornography. But, you know, good movie, all the same. I'm not going to do the jokes on that. Ron Perlman was also in the movie. Michael Longsdale. I think I know who that is.

Ron Perlman, who was completely unknown back then, but, you know, became Hellboy and so forth. So it's basically everybody who's, I'm not, I'm not disrespecting Mr. Perlman here, but everybody who had a very kind of peculiar face got cast in that movie. Wow. I love character. I wanted to do the same. I think they're called character faces. Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah.

I also wanted to do you know mix something historical and I tried to sort of render the historical part as accurate as possible with a with a murder mystery

oh murder you say murder I love that people get excited about that for some weird murder you say you have a nice voice for that I have juice bugs yeah I'm ripping off the guy from 48 hours or whatever,

the murder mystery guy, he always does that bit where he's like, murder. Murder, you say. I can't do it as good as he does, but it's fun. Anyway, so as we go out, give people a final pitch out to order of your book and all that good stuff,

wherever fine books are sold. Well, I mean, these books are supposed to be historically accurate, And I've taken, you know, great, great work to sort of get the details right. But we're in show business here, so you don't need to worry about that. And you don't need to give a shit about Swedish history. If it's not entertaining, it has no, you know, to exist. So I'm aiming for a roller coaster ride full of, you know, love and hate.

death and murder, you say. Murder, you say. Murder, you say. Murder. The, yeah, I just love that guy's voice in the way he pronounces it.

I forget what it's on. It's a murder mystery TV show here in America. But, yeah, this should be fun. And you've got an established base that already loves your other works and your other books, so I'm sure they're going to enjoy

eating up the new novel. It's called Hope and Destiny out December 2nd, folks. You can pre-order it here in America. and all that good stuff available in all the formats as it were thank you mr dog for coming on the show we really appreciate it thank you thank you thanks artists for tuning in go to goodreason com for chest christmas christmas christmas one on the ticotocity and all those crazy places internet be good to each other stay safe we'll see you guys next time and that show us out