Nate Bargatze's career began with him walking door to door reading water meters. Today, the comedian sells out arenas and is planning to build a theme park. That trajectory helps explain why Ford recruited Bargatze—who never attended college—to make the case for skilled-trades careers at a time when employers are warning that the United States 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."

The job was no punchline, he said. It came with benefits and a career path—the very attributes Ford and other employers now emphasize as they try to draw 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 a world record

Bargatze's chosen career turned out to be a very different kind of long-term bet—one that has paid off at historic scale. His Big Dumb Eyes World Tour had sold about 2.016 million tickets as of 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 back in 2012, in a conversation recorded in Maron's garage. Bargatze 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 credited Maron's early endorsement with helping set his career in motion, noting the two had recently been back in touch. More than 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 central to Ford's pitch to young workers. The Alliance for America's Skilled Trades, a coalition 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, housing. The founders themselves span four corners of the economy—automotive, asset management, technology, and workwear.

Bargatze signed on this year as a Ford spokesperson to promote the company's 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 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, for its part, 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. Chief Executive Jim Farley 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. The 2026 funding and the 2035 horizon give the effort two dated benchmarks to watch.

Bargatze views 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—and that 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. "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, he added, it is far more interactive. "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 at 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. The same thinking shapes his view of the future of work. AI can make information more accessible and help people execute parts of their jobs more efficiently, he said, but it cannot remove the need for workers who must 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 described the theme-park project as an extension of years spent turning stand-up into a live-events business. As people spend more time surrounded by digital content—and grow warier of material they suspect may be AI-generated—he believes they will increasingly pay for what cannot be experienced through a phone. His tour's record-setting ticket sales are the most concrete evidence of that appetite to date.

"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 the 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. Still, she can set the phone aside to spend time with friends, do escape rooms, and ride horses at a stable.

Bargatze argued 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 says, 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 the 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 become fully absorbed in what she is doing.

Nateland, the park he is planning, would put that household-level observation to a much larger test.

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.