First off, my CIA "pal" has been retired for about four years now. Also, we don't talk about politics because that could lead to one or both of us saying something that would ruin an almost life-long friendship so we've chose to stick to neutral topics, which generally fall into one of two categories:
Exchanging advice and ideas as to how we should be investing our respective retirement funds...
And information about cameras and photography subjects. We're both serious amateurs (although I've been selling images to a 'stock photo' house for a while now so that may no longer be true in my case) and have spent more than one 'vacation' on so-called 'photo safaris' to different parts of the country. Lately we've been exchanging ideas about photographing the upcoming total solar eclipse which will be seen this coming August from coast-to-coast.
OCU