‘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

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    "url": "https://fortune.com/2026/09/30/nate-bargatze-ai-skilled-trades/",
    "title": "‘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",
    "assets": "skilled-trades training",
    "author": "Nick Lichtenberg",
    "excerpt": "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.” 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...",
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    "article_sentence": "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.",
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