Ryan Schwartz couldn't email Hollywood. Hendrix Black could.

A coffee shop in suburban Montreal, 2010. Ryan Schwartz is finishing a screenplay and getting ready to market it, which in his world meant cold-emailing agencies and managers in Los Angeles.

Ryan Schwartz couldn't send the email. The fear of being called out, of being seen reaching, was enough to stop him.

What he wanted was simple. He wanted the script in front of someone who could move it. He just couldn't be the one to do the reaching.

So he made a different choice. He was wearing a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt that day, and Schwartz, in German, means black. He put the two together and gave himself a new name.

I can't, but Hendrix Black can.

That was the whole shift. A small mental move, no frame for it at the time, just a feeling that the work came out braver under a different name. Hendrix Black sent a query letter to ICM, one of the bigger agencies in Hollywood. He got a reply. That reply landed him his first literary manager.

Then he says the line that tells you everything about why the name stuck:

Hendrix Black got a lot more replies than Ryan Schwartz.

What came after is the part some people already know, because the same person went on to become Ry Schwartz, a launch copywriter with a real reputation. Courses that ran a few thousand students through them. The kind of clients the pros hire when the stakes are high. If you've been around the marketing world, you've probably crossed paths with his work without knowing the screenwriter underneath it.

So we had him on Sacred Business Stories. The part that doesn't make the bio is what the names were actually doing.

He calls it energetic clothing. A different name on the cover of a book, or in the sign-off of a piece, and the writing itself changed.

My expression was less inhibited. More flowing, more daring, more raw, more truthful.

It makes sense when he explains it. Ryan Schwartz has a lot more to lose. He exists in the world as someone hundreds of people know in a certain way, expect a certain conduct from, hold to a set of unspoken agreements about who he is and isn't. Hendrix Black carries none of that. No ego on the line, no personality to get hurt in the exchange. So the truer stuff comes out.

These days there are at least three names. Hendrix Black for the coaching, the men's work, the relationship books. Money Shaman for another corner. And lately, literary fiction, short pieces of 800 to 1000 words where a reader can feel witnessed in the parts of themselves they don't show anyone. He calls fiction a way of coaching people at scale. He's been known to cry in coffee shops over characters he's writing, because the character pulls something out of him he wasn't looking at.

For the first half of his career, doing this many things at once came with a quiet shame. Why can't you just focus on one thing. Go all in. These days he's done apologizing for it.

Two things stood out from the conversation.

The first was about what we allow each other to be.

One of the biggest pains I witness in intimate relationship is the narrow bandwidth of acceptability we grant one another.

Sit with that next to your own relationships. The moment a partner, a friend, a collaborator steps outside the small range we've decided is acceptable for them, the conflict shows up fast. His whole body of work, the fiction and the nonfiction, is aimed at widening that range. And the names are him widening it for himself too, in how he gets to show up as a writer.

The second was about the fear that never fully leaves.

It's always safer to not create art and not put it out.

His fiction reaches a few hundred readers right now, not a few thousand. Instead of covering that with "I just do it for the love of it," he was honest about wanting it to reach more. He believes art is meant to be received. The work feels better, he said, when he stops denying himself that wish and just admits it sits there alongside the joy.

When Carolina asked what he'd tell his younger self, he didn't reach for anything grand.

Use a pen name faster.

The shift worth naming is the one underneath all the names. He stopped treating his range as a flaw to cut down. The thing that looked like hiding, signing the work as someone else, was the doorway that got the work out at all. A lot of people carry the belief that they have to pick one identity and pour everything into it. His experience says the willingness to put the work into the world, even under a borrowed name, matters more than the name on it.

You can find Hendrix on Substack at @hendrixblack, and his books under Hendrix Black on Amazon, three in the men's and relationship space and two new in literary fiction.

Check out the full replay. The story of where the name came from alone is worth the hour.