Former spy, author, and speaker Meegan Kriley-Mackay joins 100 Stories to explore human intelligence, Narrative Intelligence, artificial intelligence, soft interrogation, and what she calls the “human program.”

Meegan’s premise is that every person enters life inside a program they did not choose—family, culture, experiences, beliefs, expectations, and ways of interpreting the world.

Her model of human intelligence begins when we become aware of that program, question it, imagine beyond it, make choices, and learn to connect differently.

That creates a fascinating problem for this project.

Those ideas closely resemble the five capacities I’m exploring in Narrative Intelligence: Recognition, Discernment, Flexibility, Agency, and Enactment.

So Meegan and I spend part of this conversation asking whether Narrative Intelligence is its own capacity, a dimension of human intelligence, or whether we are approaching similar territory with different language.

We also talk about her path into intelligence work, interrogation training, active listening, open-ended questions, and what AI makes newly urgent about understanding human judgment and human capacity.

I leave this conversation with more questions than answers—which is exactly what this project is for.

What part of the program you inherited have you never stopped to question?

More about Meegan Kriley-Mackay: https://www.softinterrogator.com/

More about Paige Williams: https://paigewilliams.co/

StoryKeys: https://storykeys.co/

The 100 Stories Project: https://100storiesproject.com/