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full article part 1
Meet the Bodyguards Signing Up to Protect America’s Frightened Billionaires Grayson Schaffer, Bryan Regan 29–37 minutes
ON a warm day in Las Vegas last January, I was being escorted through a public park by my protection detail. The park was mostly empty, save for a few midday joggers and dog walkers. The detail, consisting of three men and two women walking close to me, and one man farther ahead and another behind, had a clear line of sight across the expanse that also serves as flood control during torrential summer rainstorms. Everything seemed peaceful but, suddenly, there was trouble. “Contact left!” Elijah Shaw shouted. My two lead escorts froze, considering their options. The front-left agent looked right, then left. The escort next to her—a retired cop in his 60s wearing classic BluBlockers—instinctively reached for his holster and came up brandishing his thumb and forefinger like a pistol.
If the threat had been real, and not part of a training drill three days into a course put on by Icon Global, a company that offers personal protection for executives and celebrities, I’d be a goner, according to Shaw, who is Icon’s founder. Shaw is six feet three, Black, and in his early 50s and moves with the poise and agility of an experienced martial artist. At that moment, he was not happy with his trainees. “Make a decision, then fix it,” he bellowed like an offensive-line coach. “Whatever you do, don’t freeze!”
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Elijah Shaw, a former bodyguard to 50 Cent and Usher, and CEO, Icon
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Sam Alicea, an executive protection expert and Icon vice president
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DeMarcus Merritt, a celebrity protector and recent Icon graduate.
If you’ve been following the news, you’re probably aware that right now is a good time to be looking for work in executive protection. In December 2024, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, completely unguarded, was shot and killed outside a midtown Manhattan hotel by a ghost-gun-wielding alleged killer in his 20s whose name is now better known than that of the man he is accused of murdering. In April 2025, an arsonist set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s residence while Josh Shapiro and his family were inside. Then in May, two Israeli embassy staff were shot and killed in Washington, DC. In June, two Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses were shot in their homes. In July, a former football player who believed he might be suffering from CTE opened fire inside the Midtown office tower that houses NFL headquarters, injuring an NFL employee and killing a security guard, a police officer, and two office workers from other companies. In September, Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University. In November, National Guard troops were ambushed, one fatally, in Washington, DC. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house was attacked two times in two days this past April, first by means of a Molotov cocktail and then by gunfire. Later that month, a third alleged assassination attempt on President Donald Trump was foiled at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Among the victims and perpetrators in all these cases were avatars of every political persuasion and cultural flash point of the past decade, like a winning bingo card of our social and moral disintegration.
Bodyguarding is at least as old as Alexander the Great’s somatophylakes, or “body guardians,” and the Praetorian Guard, which emerged to protect Roman rulers as the Republic gave way to imperial rule around 27 BCE. During that time, as now, the erosion of democratic norms and free discourse helped create a market to keep the powerful alive. Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative, which tracks political violence in the US, recently published a special report noting a 30 percent rise in targeted and political attacks between 2024 and 2025. One term used to explain similar upticks in recent history is “stochastic terrorism,” which was coined by British catastrophist Gordon Woo in 2002. The idea is that, after 9/11, anticipated media coverage and increased public fear had motivated a statistically significant rise in apparently random acts of violence. Today, there are additional potential accelerants: a scummy soup of social media; unchecked inequality; and unrestrained bombast at every level of government and society, algorithmically optimized to reward the most controversial voices.
“We’re in an era where everyone can have an opinion and voice their opinion. The more extreme or outrageous or salacious, the more attention and engagement it gets,” said Shaw. “And as you get rewarded for that, you do it more and more.” The repercussions for violence feel diminished, too, he said: “You storm the Capitol and don’t get in trouble; why wouldn’t I storm the Capitol? If I get to shoot the guy who’s the head of UnitedHealthcare and I’m kind of cute—why wouldn’t the next person do that?”
According to security giant G4S’s annual World Security Report, 42 percent of corporate-security chiefs noted “a significant increase in threats of violence against company executives.” Months after the murder of its CEO, UnitedHealthcare disclosed an additional $1.7 million in executive-security spending. Apple’s 2026 proxy statement filed with the SEC lists $887,870 in security expenses for Tim Cook, up 8.2 percent, and Microsoft reported a 45 percent jump in expenses for chairman and chief executive Satya Nadella’s personal travel security.
Companies are often wary of speaking about security services with the press. But a boarding school friend of mine who started his own private-security firm in Connecticut told me that Shaw was the bodyguard whom other bodyguards emulate. Shaw’s trajectory—from bouncing at clubs, to bodyguarding celebrities, to selling specialized services to rich people with no interest in being famous themselves—is common among the private-security elite. He has a public-facing business in his 18-year-old training program for bodyguards, and he’s not afraid of exposure. He offers a view into what any company or person who can afford the considerable cost of his services can expect and allows me to meet the protectors who are volunteering to meet their demand, stepping into the breach of what looks increasingly like a literal culture war.
Taking Shaw’s class were 25 aspiring “protectors,” as they’re known in the industry. To the rest of us they are bodyguards, though that title—BG—usually belongs only to the lead protector, the team leader who knows everything about you: your bathroom schedule, the credible death threats against you, which ex-girlfriends have your new cell number. Sometimes the BG is also the driver; other BGs ride shotgun and watch for tails using the side-view mirror while a trained driver mans the wheel. Often, the BG supplies charging cables and breath mints. Always, the BG keeps you, the “P,” or principal, within arm’s reach, ready to move you off the X (the point of attack) at the first hint of a glitter bomb, an incoming milkshake, or, God forbid, a bullet. The rest of the team stakes the perimeter, monitoring wedges of the compass and layering themselves between the P and danger.
Shaw’s nightmare, as an employer, is a hotheaded agent who wants to win street fights. “Cover and evacuate,” he said. “This is a job where running away is the preferred method.”
Among the trainees were a former college-football player, a female bodybuilder, a smattering of past and active law enforcement and military, and one five-foot-three former Romanian gymnast, Andreea Vladoi. She’s also a former mixed martial artist and said she has been in private security for several years. She was my bodyguard in this exercise.
After Shaw gave a few more tips to his class, he ran the drill again. “Contact right!” he shouted. This time the guards in front threw up their arms, making their already large bodies an even larger shield for me. I felt myself being lifted off the ground by my belt as my five-foot-three BG pivoted me cleanly over her hip and hustled me toward our 8 o’clock. Shaw smiled and nodded. “It took us two days, but we finally got to know our left and right.”
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Kendra Geronimo, a firearms instructor and Miami Icon protector
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Kevin Ghee, an Icon instructor specializing in sports and news personalities
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Joseph Howell, a risk-management specialist, former US Marine, and CEO, Kingsman Security Solutions
Shaw runs his course out of a conference room at the Palms Casino Resort. It’s a bit like Tony Robbins hosting The Apprentice. He fills the space with outgoing optimism and unconditional encouragement of his students, who understand that if they perform well, they may land on the perimeter of one of Shaw’s coveted security details. He prepares scenarios based on real events, then picks on students to choose a course of action and defend their reasoning. Example: You’re in a convoy of Land Cruisers on a driving safari during your client’s trip to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Not far ahead, there’s a burning Mini Cooper with Univision host Raúl De Molina still in the front seat. You’ve got your clients spread across two vehicles, and the only rule of the park, home to numerous lions and other megafauna, is: Don’t get out of the car. “What do you do?” he asked. “Are you going to rescue the driver? This is not theoretical!” cont...
part 2
Answers to this situation ranged from Not our problem to We should attempt to pull up alongside the burning car and shout at him to jump. (On Univision, De Molina recalled that in the real-world version of the event a woman in her car came upon the scene and got him to safety.)
When I arrived at the classroom, clad in industry-standard black suit and Ray-Bans, I half expected to find bearded and inked former commandos doing close-quarters combat drills and fine-tuning their choke holds. That’s because in the cottage industry of security-content creators, former soldiers are overrepresented. But in reality, military as well as law-enforcement experience can come with ingrained habits that would be a liability for a protector. Cops and soldiers are often trained to meet force with force; bodyguards are judged by the sole metric of whether they get their P to safety and protect their reputation.
People tend to know how to spot danger instinctively, according to the books of Gavin de Becker, 71, whose firm has provided security services to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and who’s considered the father of modern executive protection. He explains how to hone these instincts into action in The Gift of Fear and Just 2 Seconds, which are read like scripture in this world. In them, he argues that acts of violence are usually preceded by observable “pre-incident indicators” and that gut feelings, far from being spiritual premonitions, are actually a form of rapid pattern recognition. In The Gift of Fear, de Becker, who declined to be interviewed for this story, describes his childhood memory of watching his mother point a gun at his stepfather and later hearing the gunshot go off in their home. One of his earliest jobs was as a teenage personal assistant to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. His company, Gavin de Becker and Associates, which runs a respected training academy out of Texas, notes that “military, law enforcement, or security background is great, though not a requirement. Our most successful Protectors come from a variety of backgrounds and have succeeded because they are willing to learn.”
“As former cops, we think the world is ours,” another Icon trainer, Kevin Ghee, admonished the class. “We think we got arrest powers, but you’re just a civilian with a job. You gotta let that ego go.” (It was six-foot-six Ghee who could be seen subduing Brad Pitt’s red-carpet attacker during the 2014 Maleficent premiere.) The critical skill that all protectors need to learn is to defeat an attack well before it happens. But those kinds of wins don’t grab headlines, and so the demand for protection ebbs and flows. “After the UnitedHealthcare CEO was killed, everybody was afraid and everybody was calling and they needed security. But that lasts about six months, and then they go back to what they had. The fear in the moment makes them give me the full package,” Ghee told me later. “Six months later, when it’s not in the news cycle anymore, they want to start turning it off.”
Among protectors, the gold standard of care seems to be the US Secret Service’s Office of Protective Operations. And a textbook response that protectors hold up as their aspirational ideal is the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, which occurred outside the Washington, DC, Hilton. At the sound of gunfire, agent Jerry Parr shoved Reagan into the presidential limousine while agent Tim McCarthy—a former strong safety at the University of Illinois—stepped into the line of fire, where he was hit in the abdomen. Press Secretary James Brady (the namesake of the 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act) was hit in the head, sustaining lifelong injuries, and a round that bounced off the limo punctured one of the president’s lungs. Nobody died. The attacker, John Hinckley Jr., fired six shots in less than two seconds and was tackled and subdued with the help of civilian bystanders and local police.
That 1981 attack illustrates a dozen best practices and operational realities. Ambushes occur most often in and around vehicles, people tend to hit the ground at the sound of gunfire, and the Secret Service relied on their training to stay focused and get the P off the X. (If you’ve ever had a handgun fired near you without ear protection, you know just how impressive this is.) Though Reagan’s detail was armed, the attacker was still neutralized the old-fashioned way.
“I know there’s a lot of gun talk in this industry,” Ghee told the class. “But 90 to 95 percent of the time you’re going unarmed.”
“Overseas?” Shaw added. “Forget about it.”
While many of these guys might prefer to be armed, as civilians traveling between jurisdictions with jet-setting clients, they can’t necessarily maintain all the relevant licenses, even where reciprocity between US states exists. When protection details do need armed agents, they typically outsource the risk by hiring them through local contractors. And even that’s no guarantee.
In 2020, Matt Dolloff, hired by Denver’s 9News through security giant Pinkerton, fatally shot a spray-can-wielding right-wing protester named Lee Keltner during an altercation between dueling demonstrations, a Patriot Muster and a Black Lives Matter–Antifa soup drive. Prosecutors dropped the second-degree murder charges; however, local news reported that because Dolloff was not licensed to work as a security guard in Denver, the subcontractor that employed him, Isborn Security Services, agreed to surrender its operating license for five years. Pinkerton’s own license was also temporarily revoked by the city.
Shaw told his class they’d be hard-pressed to show him an incident where the protector had prevented an attack on a principal using a firearm.
In Just 2 Seconds, de Becker explains, “In most incidents we studied, it was the gunmen who decided when to stop shooting.”
In my own research, I came across three cases where a firearm may have preempted an incident. The first was when two Puerto Rican secessionists stormed Blair House, where President Truman was living while the White House was being renovated, on November 1, 1950. Before they could enter the building, one of the attackers, Griselio Torresola, was shot and killed, and the other, Oscar Collazo, was critically wounded. A White House police officer, Leslie Coffelt, died from three rounds to the abdomen. The second two incidents involve President Trump.
Fewer than six seconds into the 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania, attack on the then candidate, Adams Township sergeant Aaron Zaliponi fired what’s come to be known as “the ninth shot,” which is believed to have struck the gunman’s rifle. The FBI has reported that there is no forensic evidence to support this belief, but the gunman never fired again, and, within seconds, a Secret Service countersniper had killed the attacker. In the third case, also in 2024, a Secret Service agent at the Trump International Golf Club noticed a rifle barrel poking through the foliage and fired several shots. The suspect fled before being apprehended.
Research from Texas State University’s Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training suggests it’s nearly twice as common for bystanders without weapons to intervene, as was the case in the shooting of then congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011. Patricia Maisch, one of several people who tried to intervene, was in line to take a picture with Giffords when she grabbed the magazine as the shooter went to reload. De Becker calls it “projective” interruption, a responsibility given to protectors on the perimeter. For protectors who spend the vast majority of their working hours unarmed, there comes a moment of realization that being a bodyguard is less about guarding a body and more about being one. Kendra Geronimo, a mixed martial artist and firearms instructor who works Icon details out of Miami, said, “I am a bodyguard. That means I have to literally put my body in harm’s way to protect you.”
Another of Shaw’s Icon agents, DeMarcus Merritt, told me “the protection part” comes easily to most of them. “I am a big guy. It doesn’t take much for me to bring the intimidation factor. But most of the job is being at the hands and feet of the client, whatever they may need,” said Merritt. “The way I’ve learned from Elijah and the Icon family is that we are basically oversized butlers.”
A student at the Vegas course, a former football lineman who’d worked club security in Los Angeles and was trying to break into executive protection because bouncing is notoriously dangerous, put it most succinctly: “We’re like a meat shield.” Bodyguards Who Made News
Shaw likens his upbringing on Chicago’s South Side to the ’70s sitcom Good Times. “I lived in the housing projects like that—single-parent home, had a great mom, had a great support system.” He trained in aikido and karate and in the early ’90s went to film school at Columbia College, a liberal arts school in the South Loop with a good reputation in Hollywood. Like many protectors, he began by picking up nightclub shifts, assigned to bathroom duty. “I had the good fortune that the club was owned by one of the Chicago Bulls,” said Shaw. This was the era when Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman dominated pop culture. “This was the dynasty.”
Shaw worked his way through uniformed security and loss prevention (a fancy way of saying he busted shoplifters) but pretty quickly realized that he could de-escalate confrontations and build deep client relationships. He was tapped to help move Bulls players around the city. The nightclub made him head of security. “Most of my contemporaries came from law enforcement and the military,” he said.
Still in his 20s, he could have gone that route but instead made what turned out to be a well-timed bet. “I said, ‘Well, let me see how I can make it successful in the private sector,’ ” Shaw told me. ...
part 3
In 2002, he got his most high--profile bodyguard assignment yet. Police had reported pulling over a Jeep Grand Cherokee apparently driven by the protection detail for rapper Curtis Jackson, a.k.a. 50 Cent, outside the Copacabana nightclub in Manhattan. The New York Times story about the incident noted that police found two loaded handguns. Jackson’s attorney reportedly later claimed they belonged to Jackson’s bodyguard.
By that point, Shaw had founded Icon, in 1998, in Minnesota, where 50 Cent was playing soon. He’d been hired to work a show, but 50 Cent’s manager offered him the bodyguard position. “I like the way you move,” he remembered the manager telling him. If you were a bodyguard in the early aughts, 50 Cent was probably the most dangerous assignment in the business. The rapper was only a few years on from, famously, getting shot nine times at close range, including through the jaw. This was around the time federal investigators filed court papers alleging “an ongoing plot to kill” 50 Cent. Nevertheless, Shaw took the gig. “The bulletproof car he rapped about, that was my car.”
The job involved not just protecting the P but also navigating the complexity of that P’s entourage. Shaw got good at what he referred to as “verbal judo,” a de-escalation tactic that uses empathy, calmness, and deflection to defuse a confrontation. (Essentially, Hey, can I give you an important job? works a lot better than You can’t be in here.) And when Jackson, who was opening for Master P in those days, stage-dived into the crowd, it was Shaw, often armed and wearing many pounds of body armor, who went in after him and somehow got him back onstage.
50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ broke through that year, and Shaw managed to keep him alive. But he said that when Usher offered to make him his bodyguard—while working on his 2004 album Confessions at the Palms hotel’s Fantasy Tower—the choice was pretty easy. Shaw asked himself, “Do I really want to sleep in a bulletproof vest?”
If bodyguards seem to be in the news more lately, it’s not just because of violent attempts on their principals. It’s also for being witnesses or parties to their clients’ crimes and the lawsuits that result from their occasional fisticuffs with paparazzi. In his textbook An Introduction to Celebrity Protection and Touring, written with former Secret Service agent Dale June, Shaw explains that “some celebrities are always getting in trouble and usually you will know what kind of trouble they get into before you sign on with them.” At the same time, in a section on ethics in a subsequent book, Introduction to Executive Protection, Shaw (again with June) writes that “what you see and hear stays where you saw and heard it.”
In other words: It’s a conundrum. Bodyguards might sign nondisclosure agreements and follow their own code, but they don’t have anything like attorney-client privilege. For many protectors, the entry into elite circles can also become intoxicating in its own right. “In a social setting, everyone usually says the right thing,” Shaw explained of his students. “But if they spend time in this business, they will almost certainly end up with ethical dilemmas.”
Bodyguards were cited in R. Kelly’s conviction by the Eastern District of New York of running a criminal enterprise to recruit and traffic underage girls and were mentioned in testimony provided during Sean Combs’s trial last year. (He was subsequently found guilty of two counts of transportation for prostitution.)
Shaw has a rhetorical catchphrase he levels at students to warn them against thinking that cutting corners (say, punching a paparazzo, pocketing a bribe, looking the other way) won’t catch up with them: “How much does it cost to halfway do your job?”
During team exercises, every student is keenly aware that the class is, in fact, a job interview. Standouts are sometimes added to Shaw’s protection details across the country and around the world, with starting salaries of around $75,000 and experienced protectors earning upwards of $275,000. During lunch on day four, Shaw had the students team up to rough out the pickup of a principal at a hotel, then run him to a lunch spot, then a Harley-Davidson dealership, and finally to a private plane waiting at the jetport. Listening to them plan, it became clear to me that some students would take charge and others wait for instruction, not necessarily to the benefit of the operation. The students left the conference room to “run routes” (driving around the city and annotating the maps between destinations) and to do the advance work that would make the client’s experience feel seamless. Awkward situations like a VIP’s waiting for a table at a restaurant or, worse, getting shouted down by protesters while dining were to be avoided. Back doors needed to be located; restaurant staff needed to be consulted.
The advance is where the real work of protection happens. In a government context, you might picture Secret Service agents scanning rooms for listening devices or deploying bomb-sniffing dogs. For civilian protectors, the job is more modest but no less fastidious: familiarizing themselves with spaces, locating bathrooms and exit routes, checking sight lines, identifying where a threat might materialize and how to evacuate. “We always move from known to known” is one of Shaw’s favorite maxims. “The wins happen in preparation. Bad guys get to choose the time and place of the attack, so we’re already at a disadvantage.”
One former student who passed the test was Sam Alicea, now Shaw’s top lieutenant and known throughout Icon as the advance guy. Alicea, a serial entrepreneur who previously worked as a patrol officer in New Jersey, enrolled in the course in 2011. In class, wearing slacks and a sweater vest rather than the classic black suit and tie, he explained that he was dressed like a tech bro because, despite Shaw’s public association with celebrities, most of the company’s largest contracts were with big technology firms and old-money families who prize anonymity. (Shaw’s current main principal is once again a well-known musician.)
What earned Alicea his reputation was his knack for preparation. Early on, when Shaw was planning for a music tour, Alicea assembled a file on every venue on the itinerary: schematics, photos of surrounding neighborhoods, entry and exit points, notes on sight lines and choke points. Shaw had never seen anything like it before from a novice BG. “The advance is 90 percent of what we do, I’d say,” Alicea told me. “The average person thinks of bodyguarding as what they see in the movies: firearms and tactical maneuvers and self-defense. They don’t realize that a lot of what we do is prior to any of that happening.” That kind of pre-visualization, building protocols, and turn-by-turn driving directions is what separates an effective protector from a reactive one.
Shaw showed the class videos of incidents that might have been prevented with advance work: British politician Nigel Farage getting hit with a milkshake (for a second time), then having to wait for a taxi. Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, in Delhi, walking to a podium via a patch of turf that caught her heel and sent her sprawling. “There’s no ninjas dropping from the ceiling!” Shaw said. “Sometimes you’re looking for monsters in the room and you trip over the squeaky toy.”
Charlie Kirk’s murder has lit up the security community as a grimmer case study of advance work. Kirk’s head of security, Brian Harpole, gave an unusually candid interview to the podcaster Shawn Ryan after the shooting, walking through the advance work his team had done and the escape routes they’d practiced. It’s rare for a bodyguard at Harpole’s level to speak publicly, but he seemed to have grievances with local law enforcement. In the interview, Harpole said he had identified the roof above the venue as a serious threat and had texted Utah Valley University’s chief of police to coordinate coverage. “I was told students have access above us…. [I]f this is true, it would be nice to either have it controlled access or allow one of my guys to be there as well,” Harpole wrote. “I got you covered,” came the reply. (Citing the ongoing investigation and gag order, UVU police chief Jeff Long declined to comment except to say that “a limited portion of communications may have contributed to an incomplete or misleading narrative.”) The shots appeared to have been fired from an elevated position with a nearly 150-yard shooting lane. Harpole said his team reacted to the ambush immediately, but the damage was instantaneous. “It changed how I think about this work,” said Joseph Howell, 27, who grew up in Utah and told me he served two combat deployments with the Marines before founding Salt Lake City–based Kingsman Security Solutions. Reading about the event, he saw the idea circulating that some law enforcement believed it was impossible to secure open-air events. “I don’t believe in that statement. Everything is possible to be secured. It just depends on what level of resources you’re willing to put at it. I won’t work with clients who won’t respond to security suggestions. If I’m going to work with somebody now moving forward, there needs to be communication both ways about expectations and listening when things go critical.”
“A motivated attacker, especially one who’s willing to give his life, is going to win every time,” said Shaw. Analyzing the Kirk assassination for his class, he returned to the same point: “All of the things that could have defeated that attack happened in the advance.”
The unsettling thing about that lesson is that all it required was a set of eyes on the right place. Pre-visualization—studying a map before you arrive, noting the exits when you walk into a restaurant, keeping your back to the wall, knowing which direction you’d move if something went wrong ...
part 4 \ final
The final drill for Icon’s course is a red-carpet event, staged at the theater of a local community college. Alicea passed out armloads of thrift-store cameras from a box of props, and the students who weren’t walking the carpet shouted like paparazzi, requesting poses and booing when protectors lingered in the shot. Shaw demonstrated strategies for working the rope line: staying out of the frame while also being close enough to persuade admirers to back off so his P can keep moving.
The red-carpet event recalled a gentler time, before Rihanna’s and Drake’s homes were attacked, when bodyguards were mostly concerned with superfans fawning too hard. But even under those relatively tame circumstances, the gig still requires carefully heeded instincts and military-grade situational awareness. For most BGs, the biggest hazards are mundane: scuffles with aggressive paparazzi, crazed autograph seekers, and random bystanders trying to create a scene for their own clout. As social media crested, so, too, did incidents of bodyguards attempting to wrestle cameras from photographers, delete pictures, and deliver street justice. Today, the executive-protection industry spends considerable time training recruits not to take the bait. To take control of the situation without becoming the story, in front of dozens of witnesses and cameras. Shaw had a trick for us.
When a fake fan shook the hand of a fake celebrity and latched on with an iron grip, Shaw covered the handshake with one hand. From the outside, it looked like a gesture of plaintive empathy: I’m so sorry, but we must move on. From underneath, the overeager stan could feel one of Shaw’s fingers apply deep, convincing pressure to a single nail bed until they instinctively withdrew their hand. “Keep it YouTube friendly,” Shaw said, smiling. “Never show it on your face.”