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Dina Temple-Raston
From Recorded Future News and prx, this is Click here. Michelle Fournet was in her 20s, still sorting out what life was supposed to be when she took a job on a whale watching boat in Alaska. Which is kind of funny because before that she'd never seen a whale or ever been on a boat. But as they floated out there, they would do this thing she loved.
Michelle Fournet
We would turn the boats off and drop a hydrophone in the water and sit out in sort of the pristine Alaskan ocean in perfect quiet. Sit with my toes in the water and my eyes closed and we would listen to the whales.
Dina Temple-Raston
And as she listened, the ocean transformed. The gulls and the motorboats faded, and the sounds that emerged felt almost otherworldly.
Michelle Fournet
It's a little bit like listening to outer space, sort of listening into the void and getting all these signals back with no context for them.
Dina Temple-Raston
But the longer she listened, the more those calls started to sound not like alien transmissions, but more like conversations, like neighbors calling across a fence.
Michelle Fournet
And I got really interested in figuring out what that context was. I want to understand their perspective of the world.
Dina Temple-Raston
It was that moment that changed everything. For Michelle Fournet, it was the beginning of a quest to see if she could build something like a Google Translate between us and the whales.
Michelle Fournet
I want to understand how they talk to each other.
Dina Temple-Raston
I'm Dina Temple Rest, and this is Click Here, a podcast about all things cyber and intelligence. We tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. And today on the show, look at how AI might allow us to not only talk to the animals, but but help us stop just long enough to let them talk to us too. Think of the amazing repartee. If I could walk with the animals, talk with the animals, grunt and squeak and squawk with the animals, and they could talk to me. Make a hole. Dr. Dolittle, AI is coming through. Stay with us. Support for Click Here comes from Servolai. Your IT team wastes half their day on repetitive tickets. And the more your business grows, the more requests pile up. Password resets, access, onboarding, all pulling it away from meaningful work. With Servolai, you can cut those requests by more than half. Your IT team just says what they need in plain English and servl makes it happen in seconds. Just think about any new hire. It takes hours and involves slacks and emails and approvals that leave the employee waiting for days. With Servol, you ask to onboard a new hire and AI provides access to everything automatically. With all the right approvals, it never even has to touch it. Servl saves time, money and lets it focus on actual problems. And they guarantee to cut 50% of help desk tickets by week four of your free pilot. Servl powers the fastest growing companies in the world like Perplexity, Mercour, Verkada and Clay. Get your team out of the help desk and back to the work they enjoy. Book your free pilot@servol.com clickhere that's S-E-R-V-A-L.com.
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Dina Temple-Raston
You'Re listening to. Click here. I'm Dina Temple. Rest now. You've probably heard of the Save the Whales campaign, the carry on our pledge to use our bodies as shields to protect the whales. It was one of the first first global environmental movements launched in the 1970s. What you may not know is that it began in part because of an unlikely hit album, one that stayed on the Billboard charts for eight weeks. At the time, whales were teetering on the edge of extinction. Then researchers did something revolutionary. They recorded their songs. National Geographic put those recordings on a vinyl LP and mailed it out inside the magazine. The album went multi platinum. And then Judy Collins, one of the biggest singers of the moment, folded those whale songs into her own record in hopes to find riches in hunting the whale. And suddenly, whales were stars. Not harpoons, prey, but performers with culture, voices, even feelings. The idea of killing whales became hard to stomach, and within a few short years, countries began banning commercial whaling altogether. Decades later, Michel Fournet took this idea of listening to whales to a whole new level, one that might have much greater impact. For Michelle Fournet, the thing about humpback whales that got her hooked was the idea that they might have their own language.
Michelle Fournet
There are certain natural laws of communication that most vertebrates follow, and humans follow them in birds and dogs, for example. And so because we have a shared evolutionary lineage, we have the ability, at least in some form, to listen to something and know is it hurt or is it aggressive and humpback Whales. You can listen to them, and you can understand something about how they're interacting with one another.
Dina Temple-Raston
Michelle left that boat in Alaska and went to grad school. She got a PhD in Wildlife Science, and she figured the first step in cracking the code of whale talk was to pick up where those researchers back in the 1970s had left off when they were recording the whales. But Michelle didn't want to record just a few hours of whale songs. She wanted to collect years of them. And then, piece by piece, they could have enough data to begin tracing a pattern and tease the meaning out of those calls. So she went back to the water. By then, she was an assistant professor of marine bioacoustics at the University of New Hampshire. Day after day, she and a handful of undergrads would pile into this little Zodiac boat. For hours on end, they sat in a bobbing boat, listening. Finally, Michelle had years of whale songs captured on tape. There was just one problem. The ocean, it turns out, is loud. Not just whales singing. Also fish grunting, sh. Shrimp snapping, propellers turning, sonar pinging. Her hydrophones picked up all of it. She couldn't start translating whale songs because she could barely hear them in the middle of all that noise. Which created a new dilemma.
Michelle Fournet
If you have a bunch of people talking simultaneously, their voices are all overlapping, how do you tease out whose voice belongs to who?
Dina Temple-Raston
Researchers have a name for that puzzle. They call it the cocktail party problem. The term goes back to the 1950s to a British researcher named Colin Cherry. He wanted to know how, in a noisy room with voices bouncing off the walls, we can still follow a single conversation.
Michelle Fournet
If you think of sound as layering that, you need to unlayer it so you can say, okay, that voice belongs to this person, and this voice belongs to this.
Dina Temple-Raston
That person, some party.
Daniel Woodrich
Who are all these people, anyhow?
Dina Temple-Raston
Who knows? The word gets out.
Michelle Fournet
You don't mind, are you?
Dina Temple-Raston
Doubt.
Michelle Fournet
And if I can get all of these different voices separated out now, I can begin to look for some of those patterns that are going to help me to understand speech or language or communication.
Dina Temple-Raston
The thing is, the human brain, it does this naturally. Humans can zero in on a single voice and all that dinner. But machines, they don't come with that filter. They have to be trained. And that was beyond Michelle's expertise. But lucky for her, she found a collaborator. There was an engineer right down the road in Juneau, Alaska, also wrestling with the same problem. Daniel Woodrich. He was at NOAA or the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And Daniel thought code might be the key to isolating whale calls in the.
Daniel Woodrich
Noisy waters, Alaska and the Alaskan Arctic. It is like the ultimate cocktail party. It's like a cocktail party that starts with, like a polite little brunch, you know, turns into kind of a rollicking dinner, and then parties on until 2am.
Dina Temple-Raston
So it actually wasn't so much finding a voice in a cocktail party, but rather finding it in a rocking nightclub. To tackle that problem, Daniel turned to artificial intelligence. Now, when we think of artificial intelligence, we usually think of things like chatbots and deepfakes. But AI's real gift is finding patterns in chaos, even, it turns out, underwater chaos. So Daniel built an AI model from scratch to sift through all that noise in the deep.
Daniel Woodrich
You know, I would go in and I would look at a signal and I would say, how can I come up with features? And how can I come up with, you know, different parameters?
Dina Temple-Raston
Parameters or algorithms, little tests designed to spot a kind of acoustic fingerprint based on frequencies. He'd go through the tape and he'd spot a particular frequency, maybe one that went up in a particular way.
Daniel Woodrich
It's a frequency upsweep. It's kind of in this certain frequency range.
Dina Temple-Raston
He'd tag that upsweep as, say, ice. A different one. Well, that might be a seal. Finally, Daniel could identify nearly every sound under the sea, which meant now he could isolate the whale song. Daniel sat down at his computer, pulled in Michel's years of recordings, and ran them through his algorithm, starting with that full cocktail party of ice, seals and boats, and then stripping away sounds one by one. First ice, then seals, then boats, until finally he found them. Whales. With the din stripped away, Michelle could listen now in a way she never had before. And finally, she hoped, start translating from song to meaning.
Michelle Fournet (continued explanation)
When a whale makes a sound, it's trying to make something happen. Either I want you to know that I'm here, or I want you to come closer, or I want you to go away, or, you know, these are all functional sounds or emotive sounds.
Dina Temple-Raston
And with those calls suddenly clear, paired with careful observation, patterns began to emerge. Now it was time to translate. And it turns out whales have a lot to say. That's when we come back. Stay with us. Support for Click here comes from factor. You want to eat better, but you don't have the energy to make it happen. And it's not that you're failing at healthy eating, it's just that you don't have the three extra hours every night for meal planning and shopping, not to mention prep, cooking, and cleanup. What if you let factor handle it. All factors designed by dietitians, ready, made by chefs and delivered to your door. Their meals are exactly what you would make if only you had the time. Lean proteins, healthy fats, colorful vegetables and whole food ingredients. Personally, I'm most excited about the Thai Yellow Curry Chicken with Ginger Rice, but you can choose from 100 rotating meals made every week in categories like Calorie, Smart, Mediterranean and a new MusclePro collection for strength and recovery. Factor meals are always fresh, never frozen and ready in two minutes. Just heat it and eat it. Head to FactorMeals.com clickhere50OFF and use the code clickhere50OFF to get 50% off your first factor box plus free breakfast for a year offer is only valid for new Factor customers with code and qualifying auto renewing subscription purchase. Make healthier eating easy with factor support for Click here Comes from Quince Quince has you covered with luxe essentials that look polished and feel effortless at prices you can actually afford. From the stitching to the fit to the fabrics, the quality is clear so you'll be able to wear their styles season after season. My Quince suede slip ons have become a staple for me. They're comfortable, attractive and I get compliments on them all the time. But Quince isn't just about shoes. They have everything soft mongolian cashmere sweaters, 100% silk tops, perfectly cut denim and Italian wool coats. All premium materials produced in ethical, trusted factories and priced far below other luxury brands. Refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Don't wait. Go to quince.com clickhere for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com clickhere to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com clickhere.
Daniel Woodrich
You should tell the people who we are and what our new show is. I'm Robert Smith and this is Jacob Goldstein and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast about the best ideas and people and businesses in history and some of the worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. We struggled to come up with a name. Decided to call it Business History.
Cybersecurity Advertiser / Host of Business History
You know why? Why?
Daniel Woodrich
Because it's a show about the history.
Dina Temple-Raston
Of business available everywhere you get your podcasts. It is called Internet. I use the World Wide Web Information superhighway. Cyber Security. Why do things go viral?
Cybersecurity Advertiser / Host of Business History
Click.
Dina Temple-Raston
Scrubbing the audio from the undersea recordings was just the first step. Now with all the noise gone, Michelle could get back to work finding meaning in those whale socks. She found clues to what whales were trying to make happen with their voices.
Michelle Fournet (continued explanation)
When a whale makes a sound, it's trying to make something happen. Either I want you to know that I'm here, or I want you to come closer, or I want you to go away, or, you know, these are all functional sounds or emotive sounds.
Dina Temple-Raston
Some of those calls appeared to be a kind of relationship building thing, like how they greeted each other, a kind of whale small talk.
Michelle Fournet
One whale announces its presence, another whale responds. The two whales join. They then make these lovely little, little calls as they get closer together, like.
Dina Temple-Raston
Hey, Bob the whale, how are ya? I'm good, thanks.
Michelle Fournet
And then they begin to forage together. So it's this social interaction facilitated through sound.
Dina Temple-Raston
Then she started to translate even more sophisticated exchanges. Like there are specific sounds humpback whales make when approaching a school of Pacific herring, one of their favorite fish.
Michelle Fournet
They blow bubbles around a school of fish. The bubbles themselves are also noisy. And then they, one of them will begin to produce this call and it sounds like.
Dina Temple-Raston
Pacific herring hate that sound, so they swim away from it.
Michelle Fournet
So the whales use this sound to push the fish towards the, the surface of the water. And then when the fish come to the surface of the water, they get concentrated there, at which point the whales open their mouths and devour the fish.
Dina Temple-Raston
It's like an acoustic net.
Michelle Fournet
Yes, yes.
Dina Temple-Raston
Michelle is still painstakingly working her way through the sounds, building piece by piece, a kind of whale to human dictionary. And if she succeeds, if we can actually follow whole conversations, then what? Michelle and Daniel think it could help spark a new cultural shift. Something like the empathy that emerged in the 70s when whale songs first entered the public imagination, only bigger. That we could not just feel for whales, but actually learn from them.
Michelle Fournet
I think that there's a lot that can be learned from listening and from translating. So if we could translate what the whales are saying to one another, we could certainly begin to understand things like distress.
Dina Temple-Raston
Maybe they could help us decipher what hurts them and what doesn't. Maybe they'd tell us the boats aren't the problem, it's the plastic that would give us a clearer map of where to focus on conservation. And Daniel, the engineer, he thinks they could help us understand not just their world, but ours, maybe help us see the effects of climate change long before we can spot it ourselves.
Daniel Woodrich
AI allows you to explore with just the like you know, scalpel, like precision, like a new signal perhaps, maybe a man made signal, maybe a new animal that is in these waters for the first time because of, you know, force like climate change.
Dina Temple-Raston
Michelle even thinks whales could teach us something about humanity.
Michelle Fournet
If we listened to each other the way that whales listen to each other, could that perhaps, you know, sway human culture towards one that's more, more compassionate or more cooperative or, or at least more willing to stay out of our way? I think that we have a lot to learn from a species that has so effectively evolved this system of communication that has allowed them to thrive for many millions of years.
Dina Temple-Raston
If you could say something to a whale, what would you say?
Michelle Fournet
Um, I'm sorry. That's what I would say. I would say I'm sorry for all of the things that. For all that we have put them through for, for the mass removal of whales from the ocean, for the noise that we inundate them with. For, for our deep misunderstanding for so long of, of their culture and their intelligence and their social structure, for changing their ecology, for changing their ocean.
Dina Temple-Raston
I'm Dina Temple Raston and you're listening to Click here. Support for Click here comes from Monarch. Managing your money doesn't have to be a struggle this year. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool. Designed to make your life easier. It brings your entire financial life, budgeting, accounts and investments, net worth and future planning together in one dashboard on your laptop or phone. Start your new year on the right foot financially and get 50% off your Monarch subscription with code CLICKHERE. Unlike most other personal finance apps, Monarch is built to make you proactive, not just reactive. Users feel more in control of their finances and Monarch is helping them save over $200 a month on average this new year. Achieve your financial goals for good. Monarch is the all in one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long. Use code clickhere@monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with the code click here.
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Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on? Click here. Then check out our sister publication the Record from Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London and Kyiv, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to the Record Media.
Dina Temple-Raston
Here are some of the top tech stories making news this week. It's Tuesday, January 13th. Cambodia says it has extradited a billionaire businessman to China who US Prosecutors say helped industrialize online scamming. Authorities have identified a new expanding cybercrime compound deep in Cambodia. The man is Chen Ju. To the public, he's a tycoon, founder of the Prince Group, a conglomerate that owns banks, airlines, malls and luxury real estate across Southeast Asia. But prosecutors say his real business was something far darker. They allege that that Chen Zhi ran at least 10 scam compounds, fortified prison like complexes where thousands of trafficked workers were held against their will. Inside, people were forced to carry out online fraud, around the clock romance scams, crypto scams, fake investment schemes, all targeting victims across the United States and Europe, according to court filings. Workers who tried to escape or beaten, starved or locked in isolation. Last October, the Justice Department seized $15 billion in Bitcoin linked to Chen's accounts, the biggest cryptocurrency seizure in US history. British authorities also confiscated dozens of London properties tied to him. For years, Cambodia has been a hub for these scam compounds, and critics say powerful figures have long protected them. So the extradition raised an obvious why now? One theory is that sending Chen to China instead of the US Will allow Beijing to control the narrative and keep any details of complicity on the part of elites out of the public eye. Last week, the Trump administration announced that it's withdrawing from 66 six international organizations, including several focused on cybersecurity.
Daniel Woodrich
Tops among them is the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise. There's the Online Freedom Coalition. There's the European center of Excellence for countering hybrid threats.
Dina Temple-Raston
Together, these groups work on protecting critical infrastructure, defending online privacy, and helping NATO respond to cyber threats. Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended Trump's decision, calling the organizations redundant, wasteful and poorly run. He also criticized them for their DEI mandates. Critics warn the US Withdrawal could create a leadership vacuum, one that adversaries may be eager to fill, weakening international coordination just as cyber threats are growing. 2026 opened with a rare public glimpse into US offensive cyber operations. As part of the effort to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The Trump administration launched a large scale strike that included American cyber forces as.
Daniel Woodrich
They approached Venezuelan shores, The United States began layering different effects provided by Spacecom, Cybercom and other members of the interagency.
Dina Temple-Raston
Exactly what those effects were remains unclear, but at a press conference at Mar a Lago, President Trump said US Cyber forces deliberately turned out the lights in Caracas. Internet monitoring groups later confirmed widespread power and connectivity disruptions. It's one of the most explicit acknowledgments of a US Cyber attack on another country's critical infrastructure in recent memory. And if confirmed, it would be the second US Cyber attack attack on Venezuelan infrastructure in recent weeks. Last month, Venezuela's state oil and gas company accused the US of hacking its systems to delay production. Since the president's remarks, the Pentagon has declined further comment. And finally, one of the biggest weeks in tech got underway in Las Vegas with the Consumer Electronics Show. If you want to see what the.
Michelle Fournet
Future looks like, it's at Cell, the.
Dina Temple-Raston
World'S largest tech conference offered a glimpse of what companies think comes next. AI powered toilets that analyze your waste for digestive health. Humanoid robots designed to work on factory floors and under the hoods of cars. Even a lollipop that plays music while you lick it using bone conduction technology. But the top prize this year went to Samsung's Galaxy Z Tri Fold and a three paneled phone tablet hybrid designed to fold neatly into a pocket three panels, which means TikTok, Instagram and YouTube can all be open at the same time. The future is here and it would like your full attention. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and Priority Today's show was written and produced by Megan Dietrich, Sean Powers, Erica Guida, and Zach Hirsch. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Lou Olkowski and fact checked by Darren Ancrum. Original music is by Ben Levingston with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, our illustrator is Megan Gough, and our sound designers and engineers are Jefferson, Jake Cook and Jesse Neitzwonger. I'm Dina Temple Ralston and thanks for listening.
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Podcast: Click Here (Recorded Future News)
Host: Dina Temple-Raston
Date: January 13, 2026
This episode explores the intersection of artificial intelligence and marine biology, telling the remarkable story of Michelle Fournet—a whale researcher—and her collaboration with AI engineer Daniel Woodrich as they attempt to decode the language of humpback whales. The podcast delves into the history of whale conservation inspired by whale songs, the technical and ecological challenges of eavesdropping on whale conversations, and how advanced AI could not only bring us closer to understanding these majestic creatures, but also potentially spark a new cultural empathy and environmental stewardship.
"We would turn the boats off and drop a hydrophone in the water and sit out in sort of the pristine Alaskan ocean in perfect quiet. ...and we would listen to the whales." (Michelle Fournet, 00:36)
"It's a little bit like listening to outer space, sort of listening into the void and getting all these signals back with no context for them." (Michelle Fournet, 01:06)
"I want to understand how they talk to each other." (Michelle Fournet, 01:51)
"If you have a bunch of people talking simultaneously, their voices are all overlapping, how do you tease out whose voice belongs to who?" (Michelle Fournet, 08:25)
"Alaska and the Alaskan Arctic. It is like the ultimate cocktail party. It's like a cocktail party that starts with, like a polite little brunch... and then parties on until 2am.” (Daniel Woodrich, 09:57)
"I would look at a signal... come up with features... parameters... It's a frequency upsweep, kind of in this certain frequency range." (Daniel Woodrich, 10:50–11:14)
“When a whale makes a sound, it's trying to make something happen. Either I want you to know that I'm here, or I want you to come closer, or I want you to go away...” (Michelle Fournet, 12:28 & 16:46)
"One whale announces its presence, another whale responds... they make these lovely little calls as they get closer together." (Michelle Fournet, 17:10)
"The whales use this sound to push the fish towards the surface of the water... at which point the whales open their mouths and devour the fish." (Michelle Fournet, 18:12)
"AI allows you to explore with just, like, scalpel, like precision, like a new signal... maybe a new animal that is in these waters for the first time because of, you know, force like climate change." (Daniel Woodrich, 19:38)
"If we listened to each other the way that whales listen to each other, could that perhaps... sway human culture towards one that's more... compassionate or more cooperative...?" (Michelle Fournet, 19:57)
"Um, I'm sorry. That's what I would say... for all that we have put them through for the mass removal of whales from the ocean, for the noise that we inundate them with, for our deep misunderstanding...for changing their ocean." (Michelle Fournet, 20:37)
| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote | |-----------|------------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:36 | Michelle Fournet | “We would turn the boats off and drop a hydrophone in the water… and we would listen to the whales.” | | 01:06 | Michelle Fournet | “It's a little bit like listening to outer space, sort of listening into the void and getting all these signals back with no context for them.” | | 08:25 | Michelle Fournet | “If you have a bunch of people talking simultaneously, their voices are all overlapping, how do you tease out whose voice belongs to who?” | | 09:57 | Daniel Woodrich | "Alaska and the Alaskan Arctic. It is like the ultimate cocktail party... and then parties on until 2am." | | 10:50 | Daniel Woodrich | “I would look at a signal and I would say, how can I come up with features? … a frequency upsweep… in a certain frequency range.” | | 12:28 | Michelle Fournet | "When a whale makes a sound, it's trying to make something happen…" | | 19:38 | Daniel Woodrich | "AI allows you to explore with just the, like, scalpel-like precision..." | | 19:57 | Michelle Fournet | "If we listened to each other the way that whales listen to each other, could that perhaps...sway human culture towards one that's more, more compassionate or more cooperative...?" | | 20:37 | Michelle Fournet | "Um, I'm sorry. That's what I would say [to the whales]..." |
The episode employs an approachable, curious tone reminiscent of NPR investigative storytelling. It seamlessly bridges technical exploration (AI and audio engineering) with emotional and ethical reflection, inviting listeners not only to learn about scientific innovation, but also to consider its broader impact on culture, empathy, and the natural world.
“AI and the Secret Lives of Whales” illustrates how listening more deeply—both with technology and human curiosity—could unlock not only the mysteries of another species, but also inspire us to become better stewards of our planet. Through years of fieldwork, collaboration, and new digital tools, Michelle Fournet and Daniel Woodrich are building a bridge between species, one call at a time. Their pioneering work hints at a future where our relationship with nature is built on communication, mutual respect, and compassion.