Nate Bargatze was once paid to go door-to-door reading water meters. Now, he’s selling out arenas and building a theme park.
The contrast helps explain why Ford enlisted Bargatze, a comedian who did not attend college, to make the case for skilled-trades careers at a moment when employers are warning that the U.S. lacks enough electricians, technicians, maintenance workers, welders and other people who keep the physical economy running.
“I was a water meter reader,” Bargatze told Fortune. “I read people’s water meters.”
It was not a joke job, he said. It came with benefits and a career path—exactly the kinds of features Ford and other employers are emphasizing as they try to pull more young people toward hands-on work.
“It was very much a job that had benefits and, like, a job that you could kind of grow with and rely on,” he said. “This trade school would have been something that I would have done. If comedy didn’t go where it’s at now, I would have read water meters.”
From Maron’s garage to arena records
Bargatze’s choice of career turned out to be a very different kind of long-term bet. His Big Dumb Eyes World Tour had sold about 2.016 million tickets in August, when it set a Guinness World Records mark for the most tickets sold by a stand-up comedy tour. Pollstar named Bargatze the highest-grossing stand-up comic of 2025, with $77.5 million reported in ticket sales, according to Variety. He is also planning to build Nateland, a $350 million theme park in Tennessee.
That scale is a long way from his first appearance on Marc Maron’s long-running WTF podcast (this particular interviewer was listening, back in 2012). Bargatze first appeared on the show in a conversation recorded in Maron’s garage, then returned in April 2013 for a live WTF show at South by Southwest, where he told a story about a cousin’s Deep South wedding.
Bargatze said Maron’s early endorsement helped set his career in motion, and that they had just been in touch recently, in fact. Over a decade ago, Maron tweeted that he was a fan, then had Bargatze on the podcast and brought him on the road to open shows.
“I’ve learned a lot with comedy just watching him,” Bargatze said. “You have to build it from the ground up. No one’s making you do it … I’ve got to prove myself every time I go up and just continue to get better and figure out your voice and figure out your lane.”
That self-made narrative is part of Ford’s larger appeal to young workers. The Alliance for America’s Skilled Trades, created by Ford, BlackRock, Google, and Carhartt, estimates that the country will need to fill 1.7 million skilled-trades openings each year through 2035. The coalition’s new report found that existing training pathways are supplying roughly 55 workers for every 100 needed, a gap shaped by retirements, uneven training capacity, and investment in infrastructure, manufacturing, energy, and housing.
Bargatze signed on as a Ford spokesperson this year to promote the Ford Pro dealership business (he spoke with Fortune backstage at the Ford Pro Accelerate event). “I love what Ford’s doing,” he said. “I love that they’re investing [in the trades], like, really showing that’s the way.”
The skilled-work bet
The labor crunch varies by region and occupation. But the alliance argues that shortages in industrial maintenance, machinery repair, electrical work, automotive service, and related fields could constrain the expansion of plants, power systems, transportation networks, and construction projects. Nearly one-quarter of the skilled-trades workforce is 55 or older, according to the group, compared with 11% who are younger than 25.
Ford has committed $300 million in 2026 toward skilled-trades training and the essential economy, an umbrella that includes manufacturing, construction, energy, public services, transportation, and logistics. Jim Farley, Ford’s chief executive, has called skilled trades “the backbone” of the American Dream and said the shortage is too large and too geographically uneven for any one company or state to tackle alone.
Bargatze said he sees the rise of AI as part of the reason skilled work could become more valuable. He said the technology has the potential to give people who struggled with traditional schooling a new, less intimidating way to learn, but it will also open up a whole new economy of more human experiences, like his own comedy.
“It’s crazy they invented it, because you gave me, the dumb person, the answers,” Bargatze said, with typical self-deprecation and humor. “Before, when you had to Google something, it was like, it’s just article after article. And you’re like, ‘I’m not going to read these articles, dude.’” Now, it’s so much more interactive, he added. “I can literally talk to AI and be like, ‘Hey, dude, what is this thing?’ It just talks to me like it’s my friend.”
The comedian said he talks to AI all the time, often in various stages of joke writing. Recently, while driving to a show, he said he was trying to understand the origins of inherited high cholesterol or high blood pressure. “Is it like one guy that … ate too many fries and that guy messed my whole lineage of my family up?” Bargatze said. “Can I find that guy?”
The premise may not make it into his act, but Bargatze said AI can help him gather enough baseline knowledge to pursue a subject before he does the distinctly human part—finding a laugh. It’s related to how he thinks about the future of work. AI can make information more accessible and can help people execute parts of their jobs more efficiently, he said. But it cannot remove the need for workers who have to be physically present to install, maintain, repair, and build things.
Bargatze had a message for trades workers: “You’re going to be very protected.”
Why kids may leave the screen
His business strategy rests on a comparable premise. Bargatze said his theme-park project is an extension of years spent turning stand-up into a live-events business. As people spend more time surrounded by digital content and become more wary of material they suspect may be AI-generated, he believes they will increasingly pay for what cannot be experienced through a phone.
“I’m investing in live experiences, because I think that’s where it’s kind of headed,” Bargatze said. “You want to take your family, your kids, or your buddies—y’all want to go do something.”
He has watched that impulse at home. His 14-year-old daughter uses an iPad and wants social media, he said, though his family plans to wait until she is 16 for that. Still, he said, she can set the phone aside to spend time with friends, do escape rooms, and ride horses at a stable.
But Bargatze said that digital fluency has made young people more discerning about what they encounter online. They have grown up surrounded by edited and algorithmically distributed media, and now by AI-generated material. “Kids are smart,” he often said, especially on the impact of growing up with smartphone technology. “Kids now have grown up with just phones … They’re savvy with it. They understand what it is.
“They’re realizing they don’t believe a lot of stuff that’s on any of this stuff because they think it’s AI or whatever,” he added.
That skepticism, he argued, will push demand in the other direction—not away from technology altogether, but toward experiences whose value depends on being there. “They want to touch,” Bargatze said of young people. “They want to do stuff.”
He sees that dynamic in the activities his daughter prefers when the screen is no longer the center of attention. She rides horses and joins friends in escape rooms, he said. In an escape room, “the phones are down, no one’s filming, no one’s doing anything.” He said she can put the phone aside and be fully absorbed in what she is doing.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
