I think I actually texted him on the Discovery theoretical Physics forum, but I can’t be 100% absolutely certain, although he did write in Kaku’s style , so there is that.
I kind of stumbled on to this forum, it was akin to Forest Gump going to Oxford, although I was completely out of my depth , I jumped in a topic about Hawking looking for the cause of the big bang.
I said that I thought they were giving Hawking an impossible mission , because in my opinion , I thought " space’ as we know it , probably existed within the initial singularity ( or whatever you want to call it) that started the universe, so time did not exist yet. ( because without space, there is no time) i think at the time many people assumed space was existing in deference to already having a singularity in it and my thought was it was within it and did not exist yet.
Now I took this to mean Hawking couldn’t quantify it because a whole different kind of physics must have existed before there was time and I was exited that there might have been other physics we don’t understand yet , but he took it to mean there was " nothing ’ before the big bang and I am not one to discourage people, so I would like to think , humble , dense old me , might have sparked his " nothing " theory.
On another thread , he tied to explain how singularities could be super massive in black holes, but not exactly physically exist( or something like that ) and I was unable to understand him, just to make you understand the intelligence gap, between Michio kaku and somebody like me, but it was sorta cool to talk to him online anyway .
I don’t know if he retired or not , but If he ever does a seminar locally , I would love to go.