We focus far too much time teaching calculus and trigonometry in school. Applied statistics would be far more relevant for nearly everyone.
Trigonometry in particular is so ingrained in many aspect of applied science that not learning its fundamentals and then pushing to its higher level concepts is going to seriously reduce adaptation capability in students.
And if you somehow never need to rotate things, it's a good training in applying theoretical rules to concrete problems. In my university, after 2 years of increasingly complex trigonometry, we were left with 3D engine programming and to the fact that opened my mind forever that theoretical mathematics have a purpose.
But you don't need to teach people all the fundamentals of calculus before they can apply it. Definitions and a small set of pre-made answers are enough to start using it and focusing on the statistics. When (and if) those people decide to learn it more in depth, they can go back to calculus fundamentals, and will have an easier time doing so, because they will know why those things exist.
If yes, then I agree with him. People should have more probability lessons at school than trigonometry or calculus.
It only becomes useful as you move from simple combinatorics to continuous distributions, at which point you need differentiation and integration to switch between CDF and PDF. Much in the same way trigonometry becomes useful in physics once you need to deal with vectors and waves.