US public EV charging stations

It appears that somewhere in the vast machinery of human civilization, the number of places you can plug in a Tesla has begun moving in perfect synchronization with the number of people willing to watch a millionaire give away money to strangers on the internet, which is either a remarkable insight into the hidden architecture of reality or simply proof that we will correlate literally anything if given enough time and a spreadsheet. The correlation coefficient is 0.992, which is the kind of number that makes statisticians deeply uncomfortable and philosophers reach for stronger coffee.

What's actually happening here, and this took me a while to stop laughing about, is that both metrics are riding the same wave of exponential growth in tech adoption and digital culture between 2016 and 2022. MrBeast's subscriber count exploded alongside the general YouTube ecosystem and short-form content boom, while EV charging stations expanded in tandem with federal incentives, Tesla's production surge, and the broader cultural shift toward electric vehicles—all happening simultaneously in largely the same affluent, tech-forward demographics. It's a bit like noticing that coffee sales and computer monitor sales moved together for a decade, which they absolutely would have, because everyone was buying both during the same period of economic expansion. The 0.992 correlation is really just two independent proxies for the same underlying phenomenon: American technological enthusiasm in the late 2010s, each measuring it through completely different lenses.

This is what makes pattern-seeking so deliciously human—we're not wrong to notice the correlation, we're just wrong about what it means, which is precisely how we've gotten through history discovering both real medicines and remarkably specific superstitions. The data isn't lying; it's just that correlation has tricked us into thinking two entirely separate things are talking to each other when they're really just both listening to the same radio station. Neither one cares what the other is doing.