Is he talking about "full nodes" i.e. validating-only, or nodes in the sense of the original whitepaper (i.e. miners)? Because there is already plenty of incentive for running a node (i.e. the coinbase).

The issue is that the reward is more or less like a decentralised lottery with high entry cost. If the income could be smoothed like in a mining pool, without actually being a mining pool, then perhaps more people would pay to enter the mining game. A bit like making P2Pool the one and only pool allowed on the network.