Does my grandfather want to talk about his special interests

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I suspect that my grandfather (67 yo) is an aspie —as ASD is genetic, I should have inherited it from somewhere. But my mother says that he only is narcissistic and has ADHD.
He's not diagnosed with any of these, and he's the kind of person that would deny that something is wrong with him.

He has strong interests and wide and deep knowledge of them, and inside them his interests are specific. Some of his interests are arts, astronomy, geography, geology, history, linguistics, etcetera.
Also, he has the pedantic language that characterizes Asperger's.
If someone has a question on these topics, for sure he has the answer. I think that for strangers, he appears to be an interesting person to have a conversation with, but for me (and for some of my family members) this is annoying. With us, he doesn't give us "a lecture", it appears that he wants to humiliate us, he's constantly challenging us like to prove who knows more.

For example, with us, he's always making questions about the topics of his interest. If we know the answer, sometimes he stops or sometimes he continues until we get wrong or we don't know the answer. Once we don't know, sometimes he starts to explain to us or sometimes he mocks us.

My grandmother and my mother (I suspect that she's on the spectrum too) say that he does that to brag that he knows a lot.
Since I got my diagnosis, I started to analyze him from the ASD perspective. What if he does this as a way to talk about his special interests, but he's not aware that what he's doing is wrong?

Reasons I think he might be autistic:
· His 'special' interests.
· His pedantic language.
· His B/W thinking.
· His apparent lack of empathy.
· He sometimes fails to read social cues.
· His lack of social abilities in some social scenarios.
· He can make social chitchat, but it's rare.
· His rigidity about change.
· His strong morals

Reasons I think he might not be autistic:
· He does eye contact.
· He has a good speech pattern.
· He is very capable to make and understand jokes, especially those of double sense.
· He is very aware of social status and criticizes other ethnicities.
· Like most people in my country, he doesn't have good ethics. For him is okay to not follow certain laws because in my country "people don't respect the law"; to bribe the police when he commits a traffic violation; or to fraud Amazon, because it sent him a broken item; etcetera.

About his special interests, do you think that he does that to brag or as a way to find someone to talk to about his special interests?

I don't know. It's tempting to see evidence of neurodiversities in everyone once you start to understand it more.

But he, like many of our grandparents, will have grown up in a time when people were less willing to 'see' diversity, let alone acknowledge it in themselves. These days it's almost a badge of honour to be different. He might not need to hear a diagnosis or even think of himself as diagnosable. It might be of no use to him.

Plus when you get older, there's a tendency I think to get kind of crabby, to stop making much effort to conform to societal norms, to make small talk. Why bother, time's running out, energy is low. Strong morals and black and white thinking can be the result of a lifetime of experience. Lack of empathy can come from frustration with people - when you've lived so long you've heard everyone's problems over and over again. There's nothing new under the sun. You know the answers to people's problems just as much as you know that they're not going to listen to your advice. So why bother?

That sense of challenge you get from him might be that he's feeling his age, feeling his relevance ebb away and maybe, if his physical dominance is waning, he gets some pleasure in being able to 'beat' you with the strengths he has left - his experience and knowledge?

I don't know. I just think its of very limited value to diagnose people yourself, there are other explanations for autistic seeming behaviours. His family will know him better that anyone here.

If I have any advice, it'd be to sit and listen to any old crap he comes up with. I'd give a lot for a chat with either of my grandads, miserable old codgers that they were.

In the end it may not matter if he is able to be classified. He may have made the best use of his abilities and may only have his special interests as a means to connect with others. Outside this are he may have anxieties that act almost as a wall isolating him from others.

When my father-in-law was alive, I would ask him about his work and he would tell the same stories over and over. He had invested so much of himself in his work that it was almost the only way one could show concern for him.