Payton Talbott is different.
On an early January morning at his home in the MidTown neighborhood of Reno, Talbott is playing “Clone Hero,” a knockoff of “Guitar Hero.” He has a fresh haircut, which has changed his appearance fairly dramatically. No more long curly hair spilling over his ears, his new look is strictly pedestrian. He has on a t-shirt with oddball comedian Sam Hyde holding a semiautomatic weapon. He still has the nose ring, and a spring-like wire ring on his finger, which is moving rapidly as he punches out the notes to Metallica’s “One.”
“This is the greatest rock song of all time, and I’ll stand by that,” he says as he taps away at the fret board. “This is the inner voice of a man working a really sh*tty corporate job, who got deployed once in his life and never really got to see the in and outs of war, and now he’s left with this internal rage.
“‘Cut this life off from me…’”
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Behind him in the kitchen is a championship belt, hanging over the doorway like everything else in this bachelor’s bungalow, somewhat haphazardly. It’s from Urijah Faber’s promotion from before Talbott’s days in the UFC, and now it’s just decor. It’s one of the few clues that tell you that a fighter lives here. In his window is a cutout of a Property Brother, smiling out to the neighbors. There’s another cutout of Dana White holding a bottle of Howler Head tucked in a corner. Assortments of artwork hang on the walls, skateboards, a pair of skis, and a round department store mirror that distorts your features as you close in, along with an unframed poster of Yanis Ghemmouri — the French bantamweight who Talbott starched in just 19 seconds back in June — hung next to a picture of cats playing cards at a smoky table.
One of his roommates, a childhood friend named Jack Foley, comes out from a bedroom fully naked, just as startling as a large animal slowly emerging through some trees. He’s the native fauna in the Payton Talbott habitat, moving into focus. Foley was the one who vaped in his butt in a video that went viral, which Talbott smiles about when recalling because, well, the combat world at large believed it was him who committed that particular piece of jackassery.
“I get death threats every week, just for me being gay,” he says. “I mean, I’m not gay. People just think that I am gay. Actually, I am not even going to say if I am or not. Maybe I am gay.”
He finishes the game he’s playing, and in a few moments he starts up with a new song.
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Even if you have no idea who Talbott is, you can already see he’s an odd fit for MMA’s “just bleed” demographic.
“People think you’re gay because of that?” I ask him.
“I think it’s also because I paint my nails a lot of the times. I have a septum ring. I wear crop tops. I listen to trans music. Then there’s the pole dancing. My voice. All of that. Everybody got on this kick of me shoving stuff up my a**hole.”
He’s still fixed on the television screen in the living room as he says all this.
The mailman is out doing his rounds in the mid-day sun. An ordinary world just 10 feet away. I’ve been in Talbott’s presence maybe 12 minutes, and the talks have already migrated to his orifices. This isn’t like the days of speaking to Dan Henderson about the advantages of having Greco-Roman wrestling. We’re in the new world of fighters, who hit the cage as an extension of themselves. These days prospects can be 26-year-old kids who cut their hair to “destroy their image,” and who put out creative videos for the world to decipher with superior editing skills, artistic flourishes, skating and scaling and unexplained phenomena, with fits of lens vertigo set to music and a central figure who happily embraces every extreme.
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Chaos is a kind of home room for the new lords of the non-sequitur.
The PC world from which others abide? It bores itself to death in the distance.
That’s Talbott. The fighter and prospect. The seeker.
Who is this kid? In one recent video Talbott filmed himself sitting on a ledge in Mexico as he conducted an interview. Why? Up to you to decide, but comfort zones are war zones. And he’s not comfortable being dubbed any one thing. He’s the onion with a million skins. The dude who is being circled as a savage when the shoes comes off, who received the quintessential “Joe Rogan glaze” after he ran his record to 9-0 with the knockout of Ghemmouri — “That kid is as legit as they get!” — the blue-chip prospect who at some point in the nearish future could end up a champion. That dude loves himself some Aphex Twin and a few fun psychedelics just as much as he does punching people in the face.
“Anyway, nobody’s going to actually kill me over it, I don’t think,” he says.
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The taps of buttons being mashed in rapid succession fills the air.
“We moved the Yanis poster to the toilet for about a month before fight,” Foley chimes in at some point. He’s now wearing clothes and has joined Talbott in playing the game.
Why is there not a poster of Raoni Barcelos, Talbott’s opponent at UFC 311, I ask.
“He’s too ugly,” Foley says.
Payton Talbott really is different, though.
When asked about hobbies outside of creating videos, music, skateboarding, playing video games and fighting, he turns his dark eyes back my direction with a kind of thoughtful air. There is something of a Jim Morrison to his mannerisms … and at times, something of a Pauly Shore too.
“I love urban exploring,” he says.
From the looks of it, now we’re speaking his language. Now we’re getting some place.
“I like breaking into oil refineries and power plants,” he says, like it’s the most normal revelation he has to draw from. “I went into one of the biggest oil refineries in the country, I broke into it, out in Long Beach. It was at the Wilmington Refinery, which is really old. It’s like 100 years old. I almost got caught.”
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The refinery in question is a big industrial eyesore off the Pacific Coast Highway, which has a colossal American flag attached to it and smokestacks feeding the sky. If you’ve been to that part of Southern California, you drive by it without too much of a thought, other than what an ugly counter-balance to the expanse of nearby ocean. It’s one of the most uninviting places on earth.
Unless you’re Payton Talbott.
“It’s huge, just giant, it looks like a city,” Talbott says. “I climbed up pretty high, until I saw someone working up there. The guy was cranking something, and thank God he had his back to me. I was very high up at this point, so I could see where my car was parked. I could see two security cars and some flashlights looking for me. I was like, ‘Sh*t…’”
“I like breaking into oil refineries and power plants. I went into one of the biggest oil refineries in the country, I broke into it, out in Long Beach.”Payton Talbott
He has video of this on his phone. Of the cold metal he was traversing at extraordinary heights. The naked stairwells and beams and platforms. His Chuck Taylors stealthily walking across everything on a solo mission that only he himself understands.
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“Getting back to my car was going to be hard, I was like on the train tracks,” he says.” There’s no cover, so I had to walk across, and I was like — how am I going to get back to my car undetected? Then a train arrived, and it came between us. I had to hop on a train and ride it until I got below them, then I hopped off the other side, walked around the cargo storage units and got to my car and drove away. I’m telling you, I almost got caught that time. It was sort of stressful.”
This is what Payton Talbott traditionally does for fun. Climbing the skeletal beams of industrial structures. Hopping trains like a boxcar hobo to avoid detection. Risking bodily harm by scaling down the side of the Silver Legacy Casino parking structure where a pigeon trap has been set up, for the sole purpose of freeing the entrapped birds. Breaking into the Nevada Art Museum a year before it opens so that “I can go in there and remember when the place was just drywall.”
“It’s beautiful,” he says. “It’s nice touching things nobody else gets to touch. It feels like you’re getting away with something.”
I asked him how old he was when he broke into the Wilmington Refinery and had his close scrape, because it’s fun to remember youthful indulgences.
“That was two or three days ago,” he says.
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Two or three days ago.
So a day before New Year’s Eve, 2024.
Or, less than three weeks before his fight with Barcelos. That’s when Talbott was slinking around the old Long Beach refinery with security hot on his tail.
The thing is, Payton Talbott can fight.
He trains with a tight-knit crew at the Reno Academy of Combat in the town of the same name, at 4,500 feet above sea level. His mother, LaDawn, who teaches a pole flow class in the area, helps him train jiu-jitsu. She’s a plastic surgeon by day. His father? “He’s out there,” Talbott says, indicating the beyond with a wave of his hand. The Talbotts didn’t have a lot of money growing up. A single mom raised four kids on a $60,000 salary, and they made it work. He says he got his open-mindedness — and perhaps his creative multitudes — from his mother, who was dynamic.
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“We were never super broke,” he says, “but sometimes we’d eat breakfast for dinner, and be told it was a treat.”
As an athlete, Talbott says he was a late bloomer who didn’t reach his peak form until well after high school, though he starred on the wrestling team at Reno High, and played both safety and running back in football. The early wrestling gave him some scaffolding to become a fighter.
That’s where Talbott has shined. In the cage. That’s why we’re here. And that’s why the UFC’s “Embedded” crew is singling him out as a subject on its first pay-per-view card of the year, even though he’s on the UFC 311 prelims. Talbott won so many belts fighting for Faber’s promotion that they asked him to return some to repurpose, because they were so expensive to make. He has won all of his fights, with only the final one before UFC — his breakthrough fight against Reyes Cortez Jr on Contender Series — having gone to the judge’s scorecards. His three UFC fights have all been finishes, which is eye-opening for a bantamweight. It’s a small sample size, just nine total pro fights, but early returns suggest Talbott is a force to be reckoned with, and Vegas is making sure everyone knows. Even against the veteran Barcelos, he’s been installed as a -1300 favorite, making him by far the biggest favorite on Saturday’s card.
Not that he looks like a juggernaut.
In fact, you’d never think he was a killer if you walked by him in the mall. Or that he has a little bit of money in his account. The jeans have holes in them. The shoes are well worn. He drives an old Prius that’s seen better days. The house, which he pays $860 for his share of the rent, is modest. He still deals in landlords and parking on public streets. And roommates. There is still humor in everything — the more anti-PC things are, the better. These are the salad days of a fighter as he adjusts to his wide-open future, calling to him from the other side. At one point Conor McGregor — the man who inspired Talbott to give MMA a try — was a plumber’s apprentice. Beginnings are simpler than destinations.
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So where does it all head?
That’s a question Talbott has stabbed at since it all began. He knows that on the way up it’s easy to be an industry darling. Little entanglements with Sean O’Malley and (his greatest disdain) Andrew Tate can only shed a charming light. Yet he also understands the fickle nature of perception, too, especially when it comes to fans. Especially when the tide turns, which — if he’s lucky — is years from now.
“People will love you as fast as they hate you,” he says. “And I can assure you that one day, a lot of people are going to hate me. I’m going to age like milk.”
That, too, is lighthearted. It all is.
And it’s that kind of big picture stuff that stands out about Talbott, the kid with so much still to come. That he tracks things like patterns of fan behaviors, as well as public mood swings. Maybe it’s because he was a psychology major in college, or that he’s “been corrupted by the internet.” You ask him about winning a title and he’ll say it’s a nice thought. He’d love to be a champion. He believes he can be. But he’ll be just as quick to tell you that the title system is nothing more than a construct. He’s dealing with the here and now, and if one day he becomes a champion, he’ll deal with it then and there.
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One time, around the time of his Ghemmouri bout, he said something curious in an interview that felt like a little window. He said he preferred to be “watched, not seen.” Like it was fine for people to watch him as a fighter, his rise, or his videos, any of his presentations.
But to truly be seen? That was different.
“I think when I said that I meant I want everything I put out there to be digested, and for the stuff I choose to share publicly to keep an eye on, but I don’t want people to fully be able to see me,” he says. “I just want to have things I keep to myself that are important to me. I don’t want to be so accessible. Everything nowadays is so streamlined, and everything is so fast, you can get anything on your phone anytime you want. But I think there’s value in stuff you really have to search for and watch out for and wait on. If somebody can just see me at any point, it’s too much.”
Talbott will tell you just about anything. Except everything. If he can shock you with what he says, he will. He looks forward to having an opponent who will force him to engage in some smack talk, and he’s as interested to find out how he does as anyone. But as far as tomorrow’s contenders go, he is elusive. Better not to be boxed in.
Boxes are for the limited.
Circles, on the other hand, are different. Circles, like the two tattoos that dot his front and back, keep things open.
“It’s just a hole,” he says of the tattoos. “Circles are really interesting to me. There’s no start or end to them. They’re the shape that’s most basic with the fewest sides. In mythical representation, it’s like the ouroboros. That’s what a circle is, there’s no start and end to it. It’s like the universe. We just exist in a circle, beyond it nothing exists.”
He stands up and says he’s kind of hungry and wants to make a run to Walden’s Coffee House for a burrito.
“I think a lot of answers to life lie in just looking at a circle,” he says as he puts his jacket on.
Payton Talbott is a different kind of thing for fight fans to behold.
He embraces his feminine side. He wears those crop tops loud and proud. He’s not much of a fight fan himself, so he can’t share in the enthusiasms that people have for it. He considers himself a “super casual,” only paying attention to fights that he has personal ties to. He’d much rather hang with Tony Hawk or Sam Hyde than Georges St-Pierre or Brock Lesnar. If there’s any machismo to him, he’s reluctant to show it, and he’s about as far away from a blowhard as you can get in the fight game. Undefeated as he is, he doesn’t think he’s invincible.
In fact, he’s very realistic that he’s not, and his buddies are right there to remind him of it all the time.
“If you fought [UFC bantamweight champion] Merab [Dvalishvili] right now, he would kill you,” Foley says at one point.
“He wouldn’t kill me, he’d just make me really fucking tired,” Talbott shoots back. Then he laughs. “I’d argue I’d do a little better than O’Malley did. There’s something in me that behaves a little differently when I lose.”
O’Malley is a fight Talbott wants in the future. He loves that matchup. He likes Dvalishvili, because he finds him funny. “He’s hilarious, like this little Turkish-looking fellow,” he says. At one point he accidentally calls Merab “Hasbulla,” an honest enough mistake. His favorite fighter is Max Holloway, who has sent him nice messages. One of his good friends is Andre Fili, whom he trains with in California from time to time. Billy Brand, whom he beat in just his second pro fight before cracking into the UFC, is an even better friend. They connected after trying to inflict harm onto one another.
“When you fight, you just get to such an intimate level with them,” he says. “I see parts of them that nobody else gets to see.”
If you’re watching Payton Talbott, you’re watching a philosopher with four-ounce gloves. We have seen the kind power he trades in. Cameron Saaiman found out about it last March, when Talbott came out and blasted him in the second round. We saw it against Ghemmouri, who was still in the opening phases of his game plan check list, throwing a little leg kick early just to get rolling when Talbott connected with the walk-off left hand.
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Or at least, what should’ve been a walk-off. The referee was slow to wave the fight off, so Talbott had to land a couple of follow-ups on the ground.
“Yeah, if you’re going to try to feel me out, you’ve already lost,” Talbott says.
And he sees just as much. He knows why he’s a hot prospect. He sees the odds Vegas gives him, and knows the prop bets are all about him getting a quick finish. There’s a rage to it all. The gladiatorial part of the sport speaks to him, too, but it’s just part of who he is.
Who is he?
The kind of guy who returns the gaze onto those watching him.
“There’s a certain kind of fan, where it’s almost like a form of escapism, for them it’s like watching a movie,” he says. “That demographic, there’s this look in their eyes when they’re watching it. I went to Burning Man, as an example, and there’s a camp called Thunder Dome. It’s a giant dome, and they take two people on opposite sides of the dome to spin them in the air, and they give them a really hard foam sword, and they swing them far apart from each other and then they collide. And they just let them fight.”
“And they’re screaming, ‘Die, die, kill, kill, kill!’ It’s this sort of satanic energy.”
He laughs a little, because there’s a little humor in everything.
“I think a lot of answers to life lie in just looking at a circle.”Payton Talbott
“I was with one of my ex-girlfriends at the time, and we were doing a lot of mushrooms. She was kind of a pacifist, and I was trying to ease her into it so I could do it, so she’d let me go in there and fight. We get in the line, and right when it starts I hear on the speaker, ‘And we have two kids from our neurodiversity camp!’ and I was like, fuuuuu…”
He laughs a little, because he knows how it sounds.
“We’re on the top of the jungle gym structure, so we can’t just get down. I looked down and thought, ‘This is going to go one of two ways.’ So they swing the autistic kids into each other and they start fighting. It’s so much, and everyone is screaming ‘kill kill kill,’ just super violent, and one of them just starts seizing. I don’t know if he was actually having a seizure, but he was autistic and overstimulated, and he was hanging upside down seizing. I looked at my girlfriend, and she’s just sobbing.”
And now he isn’t laughing at the memory, but smiling — just a little — at something else.
“So I grabbed her and we climbed down, but it was still going on as we were walking away and I was looking at all the people and the crowd surrounding, and it was the weirdest look in people’s eyes. Granted, I was on mushrooms. There are all kinds of people at Burning Man. Business-looking men, frat guys, weird hippies, and you just see this look in their eyes. They can’t look away, and they know it’s shameful, but they’re captivated. I see it in MMA, this aggression that comes out, that they don’t have access to themselves. It’s a weird, almost like a wolf, or a tiger looking through a bush at its prey. They don’t think anyone can see them.”
Talbott can. Sometimes you can catch enough of a glimpse of people, even if they don’t necessarily want to be seen.
