Do Great Rabbis Simply Repeat Talmudic Tractates To Each Other?

Rabbi Marc B. Shapiro writes: R. Avraham knew an enormous amount about the history of great Torah scholars, and while he didn’t have a critical sense, he knew when a story was nonsense.[20] For example, R. Shalom Schwadron told a story about how when R. Kook, R. Isser Zalman Meltzer, and R. Moshe Mordechai Epstein were together once, they decided that each one should repeat a tractate of Talmud by heart.[21] That was the extent of their conversation. R. Avraham thinks that the story is, to put it bluntly, crazy. No normal person could sit and listen to someone else rattle off an entire tractate. Furthermore, are we supposed to think that these gedolim had no Torah to speak to each other about and that they would be happy to just sit and listen to the other repeat the Talmud? (Imrei Shefer, p. 269).