Well they were indeed sleeping through the interview. Otherwise I don't know how could one possibly claim that a program whose first statement is a sequential loop over all values of the input has "constant time" asymptotic complexity.
As with everything in algorithm analysis, it depends on your model of computation. That is, it depends what you're counting.
For sorting (comparison sorts), one fairly typical model is to just count how many comparisons you do. Which, this does none (kind of, not really, they're really just implicit or hidden in the OS).
It's just playing around with computational models, not a serious proposal. It's either just a joke, a troll, or an parable about the need to be careful about what metric you're measuring. Or some combination of those.
