Comment by nekopa

It is a language thing, even for native speakers :) That is why he went to a lot of trouble to define each term in the beginning, and kept referring back to his opening definitions throughout the talk:

Simple = One thing not 'mixed - linked - folded' with anything else. That's why he says it is objective - if you look at something and see it's mixed up with something else, it's not simple (in his terms, now it's complex - eg many things woven together)

Easy = Near to you. Near in as you know it already, or you have it already and so on.

His talk is for the dev pov, but even outside of dev, simple does not mean easy all the time.

For example, (and something I am struggling with right now) it is simple to lose weight - eat less calories than you burn each day. Simple.

But I can attest it is far from easy.