Briggs is a rapper, musician, actor, writer, activist and general Renaissance man. In his latest endeavour he is co-curator of First & Forever, the inaugural festival celebrating First Nations musical talent. The festival was staged at The Gathering Place, Hanging Rock, and filmed for the ABC.

You’re an extremely busy man, you seem to always be doing a lot. Are you an incredibly energetic person?
Nah, I’m an idiot.

You just don’t say no to anyone?
No, I say no a lot, which is scary, right? I say no a lot but I’m still busy.

One particular part of your career I wanted to touch on: I’m envious of a lot of the people I interview, but you’re on a special level, because you’ve actually worked with Matt Groening (on the Netflix series Disenchantment). What was that experience like?

Yeah. It’s wild … because I’ve spoken about it a lot, it’s difficult for me to ascertain what you want for an answer. I can tell you it’s everything you’d hope it would be, working with your heroes. Anything more specific, you’ll have to get more specific.

A very reasonable answer. When you were working over there, did you notice any great differences between working in the US industry compared to the Australian?
Huge differences. I feel like in a weird way it’s way more collaborative (in America). Everyone in the room is working towards the same goal. Essentially, in that room you’ve got the best of The Simpsons, and the best of Conan O’Brien, and the best of Futurama. It’s like the NBA of comedy and story. It’s really elite. Not elitist, but an elite level of story, really fast and really high quality thoughts and jokes. Matt is 100% story-driven, human-driven characters.

Is it sort of disappointing to come back to Australia after that?
No, because you carry so much of it with you, playing at that level. You carry those lessons into whatever else you do, you get these priceless tools and skills to carry back into work here. So it just makes you better. And the ability to be able to lift up the people around you. Not that I’m like f---ing, God’s gift to writing or anything. But there’s things you learn, to keep a room and keep things flowing.

Speaking of lifting people up, the First & Forever Festival. You’re the curator – what did that role involve?
My role was to instil the values and ethos of it. Which was embodied by an awesome team, through Mushroom and Frontier, and mainly [event producer] Christie Walker, who really took on everything that I said and told them it was important to me. My job was to create the vision artistically – I had this amazing plan that Mushroom and Frontier enacted, and pulled it off. And somehow it happened! I’m big on Murphy’s Law – something that can happen will happen – so it was amazing. The biggest gripe on the day was we ran out of merch. We sold out.