There was a best-selling book in the late '60s and '70s called 'The Adventurers' by Harold Robbins. The lead character's name was Dax. Anyone that's roughly my age that's named Dax is named from that book.

When culture picks your name

There's something oddly perfect about how culture seeps into the most personal decisions we make. A pulpy adventure novel becomes a bestseller, and suddenly a generation of parents starts naming their kids after a fictional character without really thinking about it as a choice. It just feels right, familiar, cool. The name sounds like it belongs to someone who gets things done. That's how culture works—it doesn't announce itself; it just quietly reshapes what feels normal to us.

What's interesting is that Dax Shepard has spent his life carrying around this artifact of a specific moment in time. He's not named after a family member or a beloved friend; he's named after a book character that was popular when he was born. In a way, that makes his name a timestamp. It connects him to millions of other people who got similar timestamps, all because one book caught fire at the right moment. It's a reminder that even our most intimate identifiers—the names our parents chose for us—often come from somewhere we can't control, some cultural current we just happened to be born into.