I think you misunderstand then. I think he's all for a new language, the problem with Swift is that it's not quite the language he hoped for.
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"It’s the syntactic sugar that makes the syntax modern, not the feature set within Swift itself. A cleaner ObjC could have done the same thing."
I think this statement is false—a cleaner Objective-C could be nowhere near as clean as Swift!
Look at Eero for to how a simple updated syntax could look. On top of that, many of Swift's features could run on an updated ObjC as well. The problem is that the features that required a whole new runtime and compiler model are very few.
In other words, we could have gotten almost-Swift by building squarely on ObjC and would have avoided most of the runtime and performance issues that still plague the language. Plus it would have been a simpler language than Swift is.
You have heard of Smalltalk? Remove the square brackets, remove the C. Squeaky clean syntax. http://squeak.org/
And now you have room in your language to provide actual innovation. See http:/objective.st/ for a start of what that might look like.