I think that's mostly Aaron being Aaron, it's not necessarily some form of anti-intellectualism but more like just his personality at work.

I don't really have a problem with the tone of the interview but more with how vague the proposed objectives are.

Also, there seem to be some rather misleading facts in it - like the AOT and the 30% speed-up - in practice, after testing it - it helped to load Rails faster but other than that the benchmarks were virtually identical (don't get me wrong, booting Rails faster is great but they imply something completely different in the interview)