Well he was already coding in high-school, 20 years ago... Not much codeacademy then. But I can see the point he was trying to make, it just doesn't apply to him, like at all.
Which reminds me of another wealthy character with a JD degree telling people not to go to college. There might be some truth there for a very tiny 0.1% of the senior cohort, but again it doesn't apply to that individual.
But what he's recommending is basically his path: go learn it. The fact that he learned it before codeacademy existed isn't a reason to dismiss his recommendation of something concrete that someone could do.
It's infinitely more practical than saying, "Go back to high school age and start programming then".
If anything he is probably wishing there were a codecademy back then, as that probably would have accelerated even his path up the learning curve. I'm his age and back then we had to connect to the wall or go to the library and get a book with coffee stains on it. Also back then surprisingly few people believed studying CS was worth the investment.
There were places to learn how to code, but by reading books, docs, and sample code, and not watching videos.
A bigger problem is what you said in the second part. When I had a short chat with Drew when he was looking for a co-founder in 2007, he said almost all MIT students were joining investment banks, grad school in business/law, big companies, etc.
Which reminds me of another wealthy character with a JD degree telling people not to go to college. There might be some truth there for a very tiny 0.1% of the senior cohort, but again it doesn't apply to that individual.