Thorsten Meyer is a futurist, post-labor economist, author, and publisher — and, unusually for someone who writes about artificial intelligence, a hands-on builder working at the frontier of it. Most commentators do one or the other: they analyze where AI is taking work and the economy, or they ship products with it. Thorsten does both, and each side sharpens the other. The analysis is grounded in what he has actually built; the building is steered by where he believes the economy is heading.

Based in Iffeldorf, in the lake country south of Munich, he is the founder and publisher of the StrongMocha News Group, established in 2007, and the voice behind Thorsten Meyer AI, where he separates signal from hype for business leaders, policymakers, and everyday readers trying to make sense of a world being reshaped by automation. His 2026 book, Economics After Labor, asks what AI changes for income, work, and ownership — and, increasingly, his working software demonstrates the very shifts he writes about.

By the numbers

  • 500+ brands and magazines in the StrongMocha network
  • 246,000+ articles published, totalling more than 662 million words
  • 1.69 million products tracked for editorial reviews
  • 80B+ AI tokens processed in 2026 (year to date) across Anthropic, OpenAI, Kimi, and other providers
  • OpenAI 10 Billion Token Award, June 2025 — first to the marker
  • 30 years in information and communication technology, Munich, since 1996

Three vantage points, one throughline

Thorsten approaches the same question — what happens to work, wealth, and society as machines get capable — from three angles at once.

The publisher. What began in 2007 as a niche-media venture near Munich has grown into a digital network of more than 500 specialized brands and titles, now powered end to end by an in-house AI content engine, DojoClaw. It is, in effect, a live experiment in what AI-assisted media operations look like at scale — and a working answer to questions most publishers are only beginning to ask.

The economist and futurist. Through Thorsten Meyer AI, he writes the kind of analysis that refuses easy answers — from the multi-part Post-Labor Transition Atlas, which maps how different jurisdictions are responding to AI-driven labor displacement across income, capital, skills, and institutions, to the Reality Check essays that pull frontier-AI news back down to what it means for real businesses and real people, now tracking releases from nineteen frontier AI labs — from OpenAI and Anthropic to Qwen, DeepSeek, and Moonshot.

The builder. Thorsten builds the way he writes about the future: directly, at the edge, and in public. He develops a portfolio of software using agentic AI development, with the strongest models doing architecture and review while execution is delegated and gated by automated tests — an operating model he has road-tested across dozens of projects at once and documents in his ongoing Built in Public series. An OpenAI 10 Billion Token Award recipient, he runs much of his inference locally on an Apple-silicon cluster, reflecting a conviction that runs through everything he makes: capability should be powerful, but also local, sovereign, and resilient.

The ventures — three desks

Thorsten works across three desks, each a different bet on where AI creates durable value. Every venture below is live, and most are built and reviewed by AI under his direction.

Publishing & ideas

  • DojoClaw — the in-house AI content engine behind the 500+ magazine StrongMocha network.
  • IdeaNavigator AI — one complete, research-grounded business idea every day, each with its buyer, evidence, MVP, and validation path.
  • Briefro — branded decks and documents grounded in your data, generated on your own hardware.

Defense & analysis

  • Corvus ISR — wide-area motion imagery exploitation, built in public slice by slice.
  • VigilSAR — persistent SAR intelligence for defense operators, plus a public, procurement-grade LLM benchmark for defense-analysis work.
  • VizPane — the analytics and visualization platform your agents can drive.

The post-labor economy, applied

  • Firmulate — wargame your AI workforce before you hire it.
  • GewerkTon — evidence-grade construction documentation (Baudokumentation) for the German trades, in German.

Further tools and experiments

Behind the flagship ventures runs a wider workbench of internal tools and public experiments — most built with agentic AI, many documented in the Built in Public series.

Publishing & operations infrastructure

  • Grimfaste — the operations platform and command center for the WordPress publishing fleet.
  • Stenvrik — a client-side news-intelligence analyst desk monitoring hundreds of live sources.
  • ChannelHelm — a video-to-publishing orchestration layer that turns long-form video into published content.
  • RoundupForge — product intelligence that tracks prices and changes across retail catalogs.
  • IdeaClyst — an open, local-first founder instrument that sits Claude and Codex at the same table to argue a rough idea into a buildable plan.
  • Threlmark — an operator and project-intelligence tool with a built-in agent (MCP) interface.

Software & SaaS

  • Thrymvault — a self-hosted, Notion-style workspace with pages, databases, and shareable portals.
  • Cutrova — a video and audio editor that lets you cut footage by editing its transcript.
  • Delvasta — a conversion and funnel platform with payments, A/B testing, and AI optimization.
  • Readiness — an AI-readiness assessment that benchmarks an organization against its peers.

Consumer apps, games & open source

  • RHEO — a real-time fluid-simulation lab shipped to the web, Apple Vision Pro, and Steam from one shared core.
  • AmenGate — a privacy-first iOS prayer app.
  • Original games — a deterministic roguelite, a rhythm-platformer, a survival-defense title, and a tower defense, each with all-original art and audio.
  • Open source — QAtrial (regulated QA and compliance) and Outcome-First Decisions (a decision-making framework), with more at github.com/MeyerThorsten.

Topics Thorsten explores

  • Post-labor economics — how productivity, value creation, and the social contract transform in an era of declining traditional employment, and what income floors, capital ownership, and institutions can do about it.
  • AI and automation — separating hype from reality on large language models, agents, and robotics, with a practitioner’s eye for what actually works in production.
  • Sovereignty and resilience — local-first AI, model portability, and why access to a frontier capability is now a supply-chain and continuity question, not just a price.
  • Culture and communication — bridging human needs with digital realities, from parenting in the smartphone era to communication and empathy at work.

Professional background

Before AI became his subject and his medium, Thorsten spent more than two decades in global information and communication technology as a product leader known for delivering results. He guided multinational corporations through successful product launches, managed portfolios exceeding €100 million, and orchestrated cross-cultural market expansions across regions and continents.

That experience shapes how he builds today:

  • Global product strategy and P&L — leading portfolios from inception to end-of-life.
  • Cross-cultural expansion — using deep cultural intelligence to enter new markets effectively.
  • Lifecycle leadership — navigating ideation, development, go-to-market, and retirement.
  • Revenue growth and margin optimization — driving profitable expansion across diverse sectors.
  • Applied AI — practical work with generative models, agentic development, predictive analytics, cloud SaaS, and user experience.

Books by Thorsten Meyer

Featured — Economics After Labor (2026): what AI changes for income, work, and ownership.

The Global Mindset Series

Standalone works

Written as Claude Benson

  • How to Talk So Your Partner Will Listen
  • How to Talk So Your Teenager Will Listen
  • How to Talk So Your Boss Will Listen
  • How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen
  • Byte-Sized Parenting (Digital Parenting #1)
  • How to Talk to Difficult Parents
  • Survival Guide for New Dads
  • Ctrl+Parent
  • Love and Connection
  • Survive the Unpredictable

Mission and vision

Thorsten’s mission is to demystify complex, technology-driven change and hand people something they can act on. Whether the subject is universal basic income, the economics of automation, or the practical reality of building with frontier models, the goal is the same: replace anxiety and hype with clarity, so readers and leaders can shape what comes next on purpose rather than by default.

Connect with Thorsten

“The future isn’t something that happens to us — it’s something we write, one decision at a time.” — Thorsten Meyer