At 12:46 AM Eastern on January 3rd, an X account called @NYPrepper1 posted a screenshot.

A Papa John’s near the Pentagon was showing a 700% spike in activity.

The Pentagon Pizza Index was off the charts.

At that time, the “U.S. x Venezuela military engagement by January 15“ polymarket was trading at 15.5%.

Fourteen minutes later, the first explosions hit Caracas.

Venezuelan media began reporting low-flying aircraft and detonations across the capital.

By 2 AM, the contract would spike to 100%.

And at 5:21 AM, President Trump announced that Nicolás Maduro had been captured by Delta Force and was being flown out of the country.

The pizza indicator called it first.

Pentagon Pizza Watch is an open source intelligence platform built on a theory that dates back to the Cold War, when the Soviets monitored late-night pizza deliveries to detect American military preparations.

The Oracle spoke with the site’s anonymous founder about how his site picked up the Venezuela operation, his NASA system for identifying drug boat strikes and other kinetic events, and why he thinks Iran regime change this year is undervalued.

This interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.

Walk me through what you saw that night.

A Papa John’s pizza place just over 2 miles from the Pentagon was showing a 700% spike in activity.

I was actually asleep at the time but an X account called @NYPrepper was monitoring our site and tweeted the screenshot.

I wish I had been awake because that tweet ended up getting 7.3 million views.

But If you look at the Polymarket data, you had a window of about an hour and a half to act on the pizza signal before the market fully priced it in.

How does the system work?

We track six pizza places and two gay bars near the Pentagon. Google Maps updates data on the businesses hourly with location data from people’s phones, which gives an indication of how busy they are. We built an indicator we call DEFCON that aggregates all these locations into one score.

The algorithm factors in time of day. A lunchtime spike is less significant. You’re looking for sustained late-night activity across multiple places. Not just one spike at 8pm, but activity deep into the night. That’s what raises our DEFCON level.

We also show baseline activity from Google Maps’ historical data. So if there’s a spike on Sunday night, people say it’s just football. But Google has that data baked in. If we’re still showing twice the baseline, it’s factoring in Sunday Night Football already.

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How would someone have known the pizza spike was related to Venezuela and not some other flashpoint?

The truth is, you really don’t know. But with Venezuela, we had clearly been building up our presence in the Caribbean for weeks with the drug boat strikes, tanker seizures, and positioning troops. If you were following the news, Venezuela was the most likely candidate. The pizza data alone can’t tell you exactly what is happening. It’s an indicator that at least something’s going on. You still have to connect it to the geopolitical context yourself.

You also have a new feature tracking explosions that has given early warning on the Venezuela boat strikes. How does that work?

This is part of our second product, Polyglobe, which puts together Polymarket odds overlaid with open source intelligence feeds.

As part of this, we use NASA’s FIRMS data, which tracks thermal anomalies worldwide. Using this, some of our users were able to find the exact location of a recent drug boat strike before it was publicly announced by the Pentagon. This is because NASA picked up a thermal signature in the Pacific. The strike was reported around 400 miles southwest of Acapulco, and the thermal anomaly was 410 miles southwest.

We mask the data to only show the narco routes in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean. That cancels out a lot of noise. The alerts go out instantly to our Telegram group, so that’s where the edge comes from.

How big does an explosion need to be to trigger this?

The boat needs to be engulfed in flames. It can’t be a one-off short explosion. It needs to be a raging fire. One of the boats they released video of was clearly engulfed in flames. That’s the type that gets picked up.

Has anyone at the Pentagon acknowledged your work?

Secretary Hegseth follows us on Twitter. Fox News asked him about the pizza theory at the Army-Navy game, and he gave a funny response. He said they’re going to have to start ordering pizzas on regular nights just to mess with the indicator.

We have all of Trump’s transcripts. Every speaking event where he’s recorded goes into our database, plus all his Truth Social posts. You can one-click analyze any mention market term, and it tells you exactly how many times he’s said that term in the past 90 days.

But we are also adding something new, which we call ‘precursor phrases.’ These are phrases that typically come before a specific term. So if you’re watching a speech live and you hear one of those precursor phrases, you can expect the target word is coming.

For example, the phrase “we’ve lifted over 600,000” comes before “food stamps” in multiple speeches. If you’re a mentions market trader watching live, you can be very sure that “food stamps” is coming.

Trump especially has predictable speech patterns. He repeats himself constantly.

Based on your tools, what markets do you think are mispriced right now?

Personally, I think the odds of regime change in Iran are very undervalued. The amount of protests going on, the fact we’ve moved much of our Air Force to the Middle East, Israel keeps teasing action, reports about Khamenei fleeing to Russia.

What’s different this time with Iran? There have been protest waves before.

My simplest answer is Trump. He said if they start shooting protesters, he’s not going to let that happen. And they have started doing that. If he really wants to ride this high after Venezuela and show the world he means what he says, they might just go for it.

Venezuela was a real wake up call. It shook the world out of thinking they couldn’t go into a country and perform such an operation. I wouldn’t be surprised if he decides to double down on regime change soon.

What’s your advice for traders monitoring the Iran situation?

Stay on top of OSINT accounts. You can get a list of the top ones right in Polyglobe and check them against Polymarket constantly to get a sense of what kinds of events really move the markets. I don’t read mainstream news much anymore. I’m fact-checking against Polymarket.

One direction we will be going is calculating location-based smart wallets, like, which wallets are trading Iran the best?

For example, there is one trader with basically a 100% track record on Israel-Iran. He used to be called @RicoSuave666 but just changed his name to something else.

There are lots of theories as to how this account is so accurate, but all I care about is the track record. He is now accumulating another big position for an Israeli strike on Iran this month, which has definitely caught my attention.

That wallet is on a lot of peoples’ radars now. But I’m building now a system that can identify traders like this with a geography-based tracked record automatically.

Follow Pentagon Pizza Watch on X: @pizzaintwatch.

Follow the Iran Trader

Disclaimer

Nothing in The Oracle is financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice. Anything provided in any newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement of any type of activity or any particular market or product. Terms of Service on polymarket.com prohibit US persons and persons from certain other jurisdictions from using Polymarket to trade, although data and information is viewable globally.

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