A true agile process has an incremental delivery schedule. Rather than building the full deliverable and delivering, it identifies milestones as deliverable product. For example: a waterfall process for building a car would intake requirements and output a car; an agile process would produce the platform for inspection by the customer, followed by the suspension system, the engine, the drive train, interior, and so on, in some useful order.
For a software product, this involves delivering partial functionality to the customer, who then examines it or even integrates it with his workflow. If there are issues, the functionality can be cheaply reworked; building on top of broken functionality could incur major rework when an issue is encountered, so this process actually reduces work.
Agile is not Rapid Application Development. RAD has consistently been shown to be a large joke. Agile software project management accomplishes what RAD could not.
You assume that meetings are the only way to convey requirements instead of working closely with the subject matter experts in a more collaborative manner.
If you can handle two afternoons' worth of reading, I will direct you here (technical) and here (soft skills). These cover stakeholder management, which is "working with people". Part of that is working with SMEs.
If you want to argue from an actual competent stance, you'll need to bother reading the (horrifically dry) PMBOK, fifth edition, particularly chapters 5 (scope management) and 10 (communications management). I found chapter 9 (human resource management) fascinating as well; chapter 11 (risk management) is a favorite of mine. Much of the content may sound like gibberish out of full context; reading the book from start to finish is like that, too, because they forward-reference things in the beginning (integration management immediately starts talking about the requirements traceability matrix, IIRC, which is 4 chapters later).
The short of it is: there are many ways to get information out of people. Meetings are a good method, and arranging good meetings is a skill. Meetings have three isolate purposes: to share information, to develop alternatives, and to make decisions. Never perform more than one in the same meeting; you will make horrific decisions.
To put this into perspective: We've worked closely with SMEs here, and done things wrong. Sometimes, meetings occur without the SMEs, and decisions are made contrary to what the SME recommended; others, the tech workers (network engineers, programmers, etc.) were consulted separately, and then excluded from decisionary meetings. The result is often people making decision and dropping impossible, poorly defined, or useless shit on you. Then you implement it, and they tell you it's wrong.
By the by, one of the most important features of a good meeting is it's short.