JD
Sokol

JD Sokol was twenty years old and working as a stockbroker on the 29th floor of 2 World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th, 2001. He heard a low rumble, looked up from his desk, and watched a copy machine fall past his window on fire.

He evacuated down the stairs. He stood in Liberty Plaza as the second plane hit the South Tower. Concrete and steel rained into the street. People died around him. He walked out of lower Manhattan through the dust and ash, the collapse settling on his suit, his shoes, his lungs.

Hours later, covered in debris and alone on the F train, a couple sat down on either side of him without a word. They held him. He wept for the first time all day. At the next stop they were gone. He believes they were angels. That moment — strangers showing up for a man in his worst hour, asking nothing, staying until it passed — became the template for everything he has built since.

In the years that followed, he worked in oil and gas, built a family, and learned the hard way that the people you trust with your money often have nothing to lose when yours disappears. He stopped trusting other people with it. He learned to trade himself, built a methodology from the ground up, and has run his own businesses ever since — on his own terms, answering to no one.

He is a Catholic father of four who prays the rosary at 5am, grows food in a permaculture garden, builds furniture by hand, and has spent the last several years building men's communities from the ground up.