Ford's $300 Million Trades Bet Enlists Nate Bargatze

Ford has committed $300 million in 2026 toward skilled-trades training and the broader "essential economy" — and it has hired Nate Bargatze, the comedian who once read water meters door to door, to sell the message.

The timing reflects a hard number. The Alliance for America's Skilled Trades, created by Ford, BlackRock, Google and Carhartt, estimates the U.S. must fill 1.7 million skilled-trades openings each year through 2035. Its new report found that existing training pathways supply roughly 55 workers for every 100 needed, a gap driven by retirements, uneven training capacity and heavy investment in infrastructure, manufacturing, energy and housing.

Bargatze, who did not attend college, 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."

From meter reader to arena records

The contrast between Bargatze's old job and his current business is the point of the partnership. "I was a water meter reader," Bargatze told Fortune. "I read people's water meters."

It was not a joke job, he stressed. It came with benefits and a career path — exactly what Ford and other employers are emphasizing as they try to pull 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."

Comedy did go somewhere. 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 in reported ticket sales, according to Variety. He is also planning Nateland, a $350 million theme park in Tennessee.

Bargatze credits Marc Maron with helping launch that trajectory. Over a decade ago, Maron tweeted that he was a fan, hosted Bargatze on the WTF podcast — first in Maron's garage, then at a live South by Southwest show in April 2013 — and brought him on the road to open shows. The two were recently in touch again.

"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."

The labor math

The labor crunch varies by region and occupation. 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, the group reports, against 11% younger than 25.

Ford CEO 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.

Bargatze sees AI as part of the case for skilled work. The technology, he said, can give people who struggled with traditional schooling a less intimidating way to learn — and it will fuel a new economy of human experiences like his own comedy.

"It's crazy they invented it, because you gave me, the dumb person, the answers," Bargatze said. "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 said, "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."

He said he uses AI constantly, often while writing jokes. Driving to a show recently, he tried to trace the origins of inherited high cholesterol. "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 never reach his act, but AI helps him gather baseline knowledge before he does the distinctly human part: finding the laugh. His message to trades workers is blunt: "you're going to be very protected."

Betting on being there

The theme-park project extends the same logic. As people grow more wary of material they suspect is AI-generated, Bargatze believes they will pay more 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," he said. "You want to take your family, your kids or your buddies, y'all want to go do something."

He watches the impulse at home. His 14-year-old daughter uses an iPad and wants social media, though the family plans to wait until she is 16. She rides horses and joins friends for escape rooms. "The phones are down, no one's filming, no one's doing anything," he said of the escape rooms.

Young people raised on smartphones, he argued, have become discerning about what they see online. "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, in his view, will push demand toward experiences whose value depends on physical presence. "They want to touch," Bargatze said. "They want to do stuff." For Ford, the wager is that the same instinct — wanting to work with your hands — helps close a 45-worker-per-100 gap that threatens the physical economy.