Denaun Porter Finally Answers the Question: Why Eminem Barely Plays Shows

Four hours into a 3rd Verse episode, someone asked the thing everybody asks. The answer was longer and stranger than "he does not feel like it."

On Thursday, September 10, 2026, The 3rd Verse Podcast posted a full-length interview with Denaun Porter. Stat Quo, Justin Hunte and DJ Mormile keep him for more than four hours, and the Eminem questions come late, after the production talk is done and the live chat has taken over.

Hunte gets there first. "Tell me why in your opinion he don't do as many shows as he could do?" Then he supplies the detail that reframes the whole thing.

Justin Hunte: "I remember one time Paul was like, I'm trying to convince him to go out and do about four this year. I said four what? Four shows. I'm like, damn, he does not like doing that."

Paul Rosenberg has managed Eminem since 1996. The scene being described is a manager lobbying the biggest rapper alive to play four concerts in a calendar year, and losing.

Set to start at 3:41:37, on the question. The touring answer runs to roughly 3:45:05.

"He likes making the music"

Denaun's opening is the simplest version, and it is worth reading before the complicated part arrives.

Denaun Porter: "He likes making the music. If he could put the music out and don't do shows, he would do it."

Then the condition. "I think that he has to see people actually care about him doing a show." What follows is the most specific thing anyone in that camp has said about what a bad crowd does to the people on stage.

Denaun Porter: "A lot of times when you go do them shows and they don't see you, what he don't get is when they don't see you, they might be like this the whole time because they don't know when the next time they going to see you. So it's important for them to sit there like this. And I had to understand that, because we hate them kind of shows. I hate it, because I gotta keep the show going. You're sitting up there and it's like, oh man, I need this energy. I got to fake some energy if they ain't giving it to me to give to him."

Read that again, because it inverts the usual complaint. Denaun is not saying the crowd is disrespectful for filming. He is saying the crowd films because Eminem almost never plays, so every phone in the air is evidence of the scarcity that the phones then make worse. He had to talk himself into understanding it. Eminem, by his read, has not.

10,000 steps and two knees

The second half of the answer is physical, and it is the part that has not circulated.

Denaun Porter: "It is a lot of work that comes with it. When we get off the stage, dog, and your knees is hurting, and we not up there just doing what most do. You getting 10,000 steps on the stage. We don't stand still. You jumping, running, moving, walking, and those aren't small stages. They're huge. We did a show in Saudi Arabia. It was the biggest stage in the world. We didn't even feel the whole stage. It's two of us up there."

The Saudi show is Soundstorm in Riyadh, December 2022, Eminem's last festival headline set of any size. Two men covering a stage built for a stadium's worth of production, with no dancers, no band moving around behind them, and a set that is mostly double-time.

Then the line that ties it together:

Denaun Porter: "He don't like not giving people their money's worth. He's just that kind of artist."

That is a different explanation from reclusiveness. It says the standard is the obstacle. A show that would embarrass nobody else is a show he will not play.

The part he did not have to say

Denaun also puts sobriety on the table, unprompted, and then argues with his own friend about it in public.

Denaun Porter: "I think the drugs at one point in time had something to do with it. He got OCD. He got to sleep at a certain time, how he wants things to be a certain kind of way. I'm always on him about the internal. I think the thing is, when you sober like that, he's just positioned in his mind to think bad about it."

And then, more pointedly: "You're not really sober until you can actually do it and defeat it. You got to be able to walk into a bar and not have a drink. Sometimes I think it's an avoiding thing. I can kind of make that assessment, that he'd rather avoid it."

Eminem passed eighteen years sober in April 2026. Touring is the environment where that got broken the first time. A friend of thirty years saying out loud that the avoidance may be doing some of the work is a real thing to say, and he said it with the stream running.

He still shows up, just not for himself

The tell is in the next answer. Asked whether he was surprised to see Eminem walk out at Jay-Z's Yankee Stadium run in July, Denaun says he was not, because he was there.

Denaun Porter: "First thing Jay said was like, this is some ambitious stuff. It was cool to see and it was cool to be up there with him. It was fun though. It was definitely fun."

Two verses on somebody else's stage, no ticket sold in his name, home the same night. On Denaun's own logic that is the version that clears the bar: the crowd was already in the air, and nobody left feeling shortchanged.

He closes the door gently. "He'll get out there when he feel like he got some new stuff to do sometimes, and sometimes he just feel like getting out."

Sources. Quotes are from "Producer Denaun Porter Joins The 3rd Verse Podcast, Full Interview," posted to The 3rd Verse Podcast channel on September 10, 2026. The touring exchange begins at 3:41:37 and runs to roughly 3:45:05; the Jay-Z answer follows at 3:45:06. The Paul Rosenberg anecdote is Justin Hunte's recollection, not a statement from Rosenberg. Eminem headlined Soundstorm in Riyadh on December 3, 2022; Denaun's "biggest stage in the world" is his own description of it. The Yankee Stadium appearance was July 11, 2026.