‘It’s crazy they invented it’: Nate Bargatze on the bright future of skilled trades, the urgency of live experience, and the coming of AI

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,........

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