He gave the Simplicity Matters talks at Railsconf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0) and opened my eyes to a lot of important issues. He's accessible yet challenging.
It didn't make me want to do Clojure, but I definitely wanted to fully understand the message.
Rich Hickey is really, really smart and friendly enough, but he doesn't engage with the community nearly as much as Jose Valim or Chris McCord (Elixir and Phoenix devs) do.
Jose and Chris really go above and beyond. Almost every elixir/phoenix question I see on stackoverflow has a really solid response from one of them with not just an answer but often insights into the why something works a specific way as well.
To me the JVM is battle proven unreliable and fidgety to use.