Wait, what? No. Much more like Pascal/ALGOL.
Absolutely wonderful interview though
If it's 1969, and you didn't happen to have heard of ALGOL, what you know is COBOL, FORTRAN, Assembly, and maybe BASIC: then yeah, PL/I looks like a more modern version of COBOL.
One advantage over FORTRAN IV was that PL/I had complex number types and the associated math libraries. This made certain engineering calculations much easier, for example, transmission line calculations.
It suffered from being IBM proprietary and from its size and complexity, which were too great for the early wave of minicomputers. Hence the rise of the much smaller and more open C language.