Payton Talbott Explains Why He Chose MMA Over Career in Psychology

The undefeated Ultimate Fighting Championship bantamweight prospect had never trained in MMA until the age of 17 or 18, when he saw Conor McGregor’s highlights while sitting at a restaurant. Talbott was getting his bachelors in psychology from the University of Nevada when he started dabbling in the sport.

“I have a bachelor’s in it [psychology]… I did general but towards the later years I got super into the neuroscience courses because they were more interesting to me. But I started out wanting to do clinical…I got into that [MMA] when I was a senior in high school,” Talbott said during an appearance on "The MMA Hour.”

“When I just graduated, I like didn’t have sports anymore, I was just super bored. And I had always been interested in psychology, so I just did both of those. I was an amateur fighter and pro fighter while I was still in college getting my degree.

“I was never a fan of MMA until I started doing it when I was like 17 or 18… No I didn’t even know what it [the UFC] was until I was sitting at a sushi restaurant and I saw Conor McGregor highlights or something for some fights that were coming up. And I was looking at it like, ‘There’s no way that’s actually a thing, like people are actually allowed to fight in a cage.’ And that’s when I started thinking about, ‘I’d like to try that, I’m super bored.’ But I never knew what it was before that.”

After seven to eight months of serious training, Talbott’s coach at the Reno Academy of Combat approached him, proposing an amateur debut. While Talbott’s MMA career had started during his college days, he didn’t decide on taking it up as a career until he was 2-0 as a pro. What motivated the choice was his frustration with the field of mental health. Talbott, who recently declared himself “not sensitive,” also revealed that he “hates people’s problems.” According to Talbott, most people dealing with mental health issues don’t really want to help themselves.

“It’s just the mental health field,” he said. “Half of them don’t really want to help themselves. So it gets really frustrating coming from me, just the person who I am, just like a simple problem-fixer guy. Try to give these people these tips or try to walk them through how to get better and it’s just like at the end of the day, they didn’t really want to help themselves. They just want something to feel upset about. So I got pretty burned out on that.”

In his most recent outing, Talbott defeated Cameron Saaiman via second-round TKO at UFC on ESPN 53 on Saturday.

Reference: https://www.sherdog.com/news/news/Payton-Talbott-Explains-Why-He-Chose-MMA-Over-Career-in-Psychology-193094