Carl Miller

Carl Miller is best known as the host and writer of smash hit true-crime podcast Kill List, which reached the top ten of the UK podcast charts in Autumn 2025.

It tells the story of how he discovered a secret Kill list targeting hundreds of innocent people on a murder for hire website on the dark net. When law enforcement fails to take it seriously, Carl is thrown into a race against time to warn those in danger and uncover the truth about the people who want them dead.
 
Carl speaks to audiences around the world about how the digital revolution is causing power structures to crumble and evolve. He’s spoken in Parliament, to NATO, the Hay Literary Festival, Oxford University, the British Academy, the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, Wired, Shell, the Mayor of London, and Latitude. He’s delivered keynotes at major international events in Chicago, Bangkok, Berlin, Vienna, Oslo, Leiden, Berlin, San Francisco, Riga, Prague and Ottawa.

Carl’s debut book is The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab. In it, he traces how new, digital forms of power have chipped away at the old, familiar places where power used to sit; scaring CEOs, forcing politicians to resign, swallowing up newspapers, eclipsing experts, and pulling down companies.

From living in a political technology commune to visiting an information warfare base, meeting fake news merchants in Kosovo, hikikomori in South Korea, digital democrats in Taiwan, hackers in Las Vegas to assassination markets on the dark net, these are Carl's long-term, immersive investigations.
 
Over the last 15 years, Carl has led over 40 major projects to research the digital world. He highlighted the influence of conspiracy theories in 2010, called for digital literacy education in 2012. He warned about the rise of crypto-currencies in 2013, and how the digital world was transforming policing. With the former Director of GCHQ, he coined 'SOCMINT' - social media intelligence. In 2015 he led a team monitoring the rise of digital politics over the General Election. In 2016 he worked on using machine learning to measure how social media was targeting minority groups for abuse. From 2019 onwards, he has focussed on confronting the rise of shadowy forms of influence, disinformation and information warfare.
 
Carl combines immersive first-person story-telling with data and evidence to talk to audiences about the real dangers and opportunities that new technology have created. He draws on links and contrasts between dozens of investigations, from time with police cyber-crime teams to cyber-criminals, information warfare officers, spoken with fake news merchants, presidents, spies and digital ministers.

These voices come together on the stage to help audiences understand how every single aspect of our lives are changing in often unseen yet important ways: who is really in control of AI, how crime has completely transformed, the way that disinformation really works, how democracies are embattled and politics is in upheaval, how professional journalism is being choked and changed, digital geopolitics, and how business in the digital age sits on a knife-edge between two visions.

CyberCrime
Fifteen years ago, Carl founded the think tank Demos. More recently, he led a four-year-long secret investigation into a sophisticated network of organised criminal sites, which resulted in 34 arrests, 28 convictions and over 180 years of prison time. This became the basis of the global #1 podcast Kill List (Wondery), winner of the Guardian Podcast of the Year and the Broadcasting Press Guild Best Podcast of 2025.

In this talk, Carl will show how scam networks work, create social trust, and recruit. Carl will highlight an emerging wave of criminal scams bolstered by AI-generated manipulation, cryptocurrencies, and state-sponsored support. Carl will portray how the threat is changing, where it is heading, who it will target and how we can best prepare

Digital Geopolitics
Information spaces are now treated as theatres of war where state-aligned hacktivist groups have emerged, coordinating attacks against Western infrastructure. From AI models and hyper-scalers to TikTok’s algorithm and internet protocols, technology is now a strategic asset in the geopolitical arena.

Carl has been at the forefront of democratic responses, delivering keynotes at NATO summits and leading tech teams to counter disinformation. In this keynote, Carl will explore this new geopolitical terrain, the rivalries and alliances it has created, and what this theatre of war means for global risk and businesses navigating it.

AI and Power
AI is reshaping power in all manners of life; sociologically, politically and economically. Chatbots are reshaping relationships, models can seamlessly summarise videos across languages, and prompting AI is perhaps the only future-proof skill left. From watching criminals using AI to dissecting addictive technology, Carl has tracked the hidden ways that technology is used to shape our lives and business. Fresh from his 5-part exploration of power and AI with Intelligence Squared, Carl will chart and diagnose the shifting power dynamics in today’s world, how AI is redistributing power and what we can all do to reclaim it.

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