There doesn't really seem to be a whole lot new here. I think he understands what services Amtrak's long distance trains run pretty well - assuming the Palmetto is a long distance train, the count is 15, and the quote is "Probably today, we operate 15 of them..." without any question mark. I'd like to hear the exact interview and language, because it seems more like odd phrasing, not him not knowing the long distance network. (Same with the Zephyr's endpoint - the posters for the route all say San Francisco, even before Anderson, and it serves the San Francisco market even if the train doesn't end in San Francisco proper.)
What frustrates me more than anything else is that he hasn't articulated much of a concrete vision. He's made very high-level comments of wanting to focus on corridors and cut back on long distance trains, but without a clear, detailed vision of what that looks like, including cost estimates, there's really not a whole lot to look forward to or to be optimistic about. Amtrak is still hamstrung by the 750-mile rule, and there's little discussion of changing that. It'll also take quite a bit of additional funding to build out a respectable corridor network; cutting 5 long distance routes might give you four trains a day on 4-5 400-mile corridors. That's not a comprehensive national network by any sense of the definition. If somehow cutting 5 long distance trains would get us corridor networks similar to western Europe, I'd gladly make that tradeoff. But the long distance trains don't use up anywhere near that level of resources, and so focusing on those without articulating a vision and making a case to Congress for it doesn't do a whole lot to get people on your side.