Reading the Room: How to Use Open Source Intelligence to Get Ahead of What’s Coming

OSINT tools, prediction markets, and open source data can help you see disruptions coming before they arrive. Here is how to build that intelligence diet.

This post is a collaboration between The Calibrated Citizen, Pre-Mortem, and The OSINTion. Three publications that approach the same underlying problem from different angles: the world is changing faster than most people’s information diet can track, and the gap between what is actually happening and what the average person understands about what is happening has real consequences for how prepared they are.

The Calibrated Citizen is about practical preparedness. Pre-Mortem is about anticipating what comes next before it arrives. The OSINTion is about the tools and methods that make both possible. This post is where those three things converge.

The Problem With Waiting for the News

Most people’s understanding of current events is mediated by sources that are, by design, behind the curve. Mainstream news reports on things after they happen. Social media amplifies whatever generates the most emotional response, which is not the same as whatever is most important or most predictive. Government communications are optimized for managing public reaction, not for helping individuals make informed decisions.

None of this is a conspiracy. It is just the structure of how information moves from events to audiences. The lag time is real, the filtering is real, and the distortion is real. For someone trying to make preparedness decisions based on what is actually developing in the world, this is a problem.

The alternative is not to spend sixteen hours a day consuming raw intelligence feeds. It is to build a small, well-chosen set of sources and tools that surface signal rather than noise, and to develop enough analytical literacy to know what you are looking at when you see it. That is what this post is about.

The Framework Before the Tools

Before getting to specific tools, a framework for thinking about information sources is worth establishing. Not all sources are equally useful, and understanding why separates the practitioners from the people who just have a lot of browser tabs open.

The most useful information for preparedness purposes is leading rather than lagging. Leading indicators show you what is developing before it fully materializes. A shipping disruption in a major port is a leading indicator for supply chain stress weeks before empty shelves appear. Military aircraft movement patterns are a leading indicator for geopolitical escalation before official statements are made. Commodity price spikes are a leading indicator for downstream inflation before it shows up in consumer goods.

Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash

Lagging indicators tell you what already happened. They are useful for context and confirmation but not for getting ahead of anything. Most news is lagging.

The second dimension worth understanding is signal versus noise. High-signal sources give you information that is predictive, specific, and actionable. Low-signal sources give you a lot of content that is attention-grabbing but does not change what you should do or how you should think. The ratio of signal to noise in most social media feeds is poor. The ratio in a well-curated set of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) tools is significantly better.

The third dimension is crowd versus expert. Prediction markets aggregate the judgments of many participants who have financial stakes in being right. Expert analysis aggregates the judgments of people with deep knowledge of specific domains. Both have value. Neither should be your only source. Understanding the difference between them and what each is good at is part of developing analytical literacy.

The Tools

World Monitor

World Monitor is the closest thing currently available to a single-pane-of-glass view of global situational awareness. It aggregates real-time conflict tracking from established databases like ACLED and UCDP, military flight monitoring via ADS-B transponder data, maritime vessel tracking including dark vessel detection for ships that have turned off their transponders, commodity and market data, earthquake and infrastructure monitoring, and a country instability index that scores nations by their current risk profile.

For a preparedness audience, the most directly useful features are the supply chain-adjacent data: commodity prices, shipping activity, infrastructure status, and conflict zone tracking that maps to where goods are produced and how they move. A spike in energy commodity prices, a pattern of dark vessel activity in a critical shipping lane, or a deteriorating instability score in a country that produces a significant portion of a specific good are all early signals worth tracking.

World Monitor is free to use at a basic level and has a pro tier for more depth. It is built for people who want to understand what is happening in the world before it filters down through mainstream channels.

The Apocalypse Early Warning System

Kyle McDonald’s Early Warning System, at ews.kylemcdonald.net, takes a narrower but fascinating approach. It monitors tracked private aircraft concurrent-activity anomaly signals, which in plain language means it watches private jet flight patterns for deviations from normal behavior and flags when those deviations are statistically significant.

The underlying logic is that certain types of private aircraft activity, particularly when multiple anomalies occur simultaneously or in geographic clusters, has historically preceded significant geopolitical events. The tool does not tell you what is going to happen. It tells you when the pattern of flight activity looks different from baseline in ways that are worth paying attention to.

This is a Pre-Mortem kind of tool. It is not useful for immediate tactical decisions. It is useful for the kind of pattern recognition that informs longer-term preparedness thinking. If you are trying to develop a sense of whether geopolitical conditions are escalating or de-escalating, watching for anomalies in government flight activity is a legitimate data point.

PIZZINT

PIZZINT earns its place on this list for being both useful and genuinely funny. It monitors pizza delivery orders to government facilities, defense contractors, and intelligence agencies. The underlying insight is well-documented: when something significant is happening inside a sensitive facility, the people working long hours tend to order food. Pizza delivery spikes to the Pentagon, Langley, or similar facilities have preceded or coincided with significant events often enough to be taken at least semi-seriously as a signal.

Is it reliable? No. Is it the kind of oblique, unconventional signal that OSINT practitioners pay attention to because it bypasses the normal information management apparatus? Yes. A PIZZINT spike is not actionable on its own. Combined with other signals, it is another data point in a pattern that might be worth noting.

It is also a useful illustration of the broader OSINT principle: information leaks from systems in unexpected places, and paying attention to those leaks sometimes surfaces things that more official channels conceal.

Prediction Markets: Polymarket and Kalshi

This is where Pre-Mortem has the most to say, because prediction markets represent a fundamentally different kind of information source than anything else on this list.

Polymarket and Kalshi are platforms where participants bet real money on the outcomes of specific events: elections, economic indicators, geopolitical developments, policy decisions. The prices on these markets represent the aggregate judgment of participants who have financial stakes in being right, which creates different incentives than punditry, journalism, or social media commentary.

The academic literature on prediction markets is generally positive. They tend to outperform individual expert forecasts on questions where they have sufficient liquidity and a clear resolution criterion. They also update faster than most other information sources as new information becomes available, because participants who see their positions becoming wrong have a financial incentive to update immediately.

For a preparedness audience, the most useful applications are tracking the probability of events that would have significant downstream effects: policy changes that affect supply chains, geopolitical escalations, economic indicators, election outcomes in countries that affect global stability. Watching these probabilities move over time is more informative than reading pundit commentary about the same events, because the probability represents a crowd-sourced estimate rather than one person’s opinion.

The limitation worth understanding is that prediction markets require a clear resolution criterion and a specific timeframe. They are better at answering “will X happen by Y date” than at answering “how bad will X get” or “what comes after X.” They are a useful layer in your information diet, not a complete picture.

Kalshi is US-regulated and operates as a designated contract market. Polymarket operates via blockchain and has had regulatory complications in the United States. Both are worth knowing about. Check the current regulatory status of each before using.

Building Your Own Feed

The goal is not to consume all of these tools constantly. It is to build a rhythm of checking sources that matter, at a cadence that gives you early awareness without consuming your life.

A practical approach: World Monitor as a weekly or twice-weekly check for global situational awareness and trending instability. The Early Warning System as an occasional check when other signals suggest elevated geopolitical activity. PIZZINT as a curiosity layer, worth noting when it spikes in context of other indicators. Polymarket or Kalshi as a regular reference point for the probability of specific events you are tracking.

Layer these over a curated news diet that prioritizes primary sources over aggregators, official government communications over media interpretations of them, and financial and commodity markets over political commentary. What markets are doing is often a better leading indicator than what analysts are saying about what markets are doing.

The analytical skill being developed here is pattern recognition across sources. No single source tells you much. The convergence of signals across multiple independent sources is where the actual intelligence lives. When flight anomaly data, commodity price movements, prediction market probabilities, and shipping disruption indicators all start pointing in the same direction, that is worth taking seriously. When only one of them moves, it is worth noting but not acting on.

Why This Matters for Preparedness

Every post in this series has emphasized that preparedness is not a reactive exercise. You do not prepare after the disruption arrives. You prepare during the window when things are still relatively stable, using your best current understanding of what is developing.

The tools and framework in this post are how you keep that window as wide as possible. Understanding what is actually happening in the world, before it filters through the media apparatus that normalizes and delays and distorts, gives you more time to act on what you learn.

That extra time is the whole point. An ounce of preparation is more valuable than a pound of response. The information tools that help you see what is coming earlier are what make that ounce possible.

Pre-Mortem applies this framework to geopolitical and structural analysis. The OSINTion covers the methods and tools in more depth for practitioners who want to go further. The Calibrated Citizen translates the signal into practical preparedness decisions. Together, the three publications cover the full loop from intelligence to action.