I've written tons of Rust and C++ over the last 6 years, both in the context of large, complex codebases with hard real-time performance requirements. I've also managed teams where I've had to 'train' new engineers and I can say that it is categorically false that Rust is easier to learn than C++, it's not even close.
From my experience, it takes any new engineer, even if they have significant Rust experience, at least 3x the amount of time to get comfortable with a new Rust codebase than it does with a new C++ codebase. BUT, once you get past a certain stage of complexity, and everyone gets accustomed to the Rust codebase, managing the Rust codebase becomes a lot easier than the C++ one.
I'm note sure if I have completely misunderstood your comment, but are you saying that scientists exist "just to poison the well for the benefit of the billionaire class"???
No, not scientists. Scientists are wonderful. I'm particularly talking about celebrity scientists, especially those who ran with the new-atheist horsemen back in the 2000s and early 2010s when they were more popular. Thanks for the comment, I went ahead and edited the original one to be clearer about who I am talking about.
Also in fairness to Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson (I don't know about Bill Nye), I don't think they were adversarial toward religion. Certainly not like Dawkins.
I will not discuss his capabilities as a scientist since I'm not qualified to speak on hard physics at all - but this relationship between these people has me very skeptical of their truest intentions.
But you're right that Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson were not in the same class as Richard Dawkins or Lawrence Krauss in particular. I'd include Sam Harris in this group too.
I think it's always a good idea to learn as many different paradigms as possible. It also really depends on what direction you want to take your career/what the C++ team at your company is working on. C++ will be king for high performance, real-time compute for a long, long time. I work for a VR company making a VR-specific game engine, and C++ is pretty much the only game in town for extremely high performance, real-time graphics. So if you're interested in taking your career in the direction of high-performance, real-time systems then C++ is a great language to learn.
As an ex mathematician, I can't handle the part where he claims mathematicians have only been studying imaginary numbers "in recent decades" and then goes on to say that Mandelbrot is the first person to rigorously study these kinds of systems. Made me die inside.
And the whole "mathematicians are only interested in problems they can solve" bit. Mathematicians have been interested in unsolved problems as long as maths has existed!
Edit: Okay, now I've watched the whole talk. Overall it's great.
From my experience, it takes any new engineer, even if they have significant Rust experience, at least 3x the amount of time to get comfortable with a new Rust codebase than it does with a new C++ codebase. BUT, once you get past a certain stage of complexity, and everyone gets accustomed to the Rust codebase, managing the Rust codebase becomes a lot easier than the C++ one.