Really nice show for all the reasons mentioned... It has me thinking about something a little more general though.
I have been poking around economics a bit lately (please don't judge me too harshly ;-p ), and I was lucky enough to stumble first upon the Austrian school of economics thus named for its origins. They are pretty critical of empirical economics one of the reasons being that empirical extrapolations don't tend to take into account "black swan" events, that is, events that happen so rarely that they are highly improbable. Austrians I think would assert that if your first principles are well posed, then they will be able to explain or at least integrate these events without a great deal of ad hoc transformation of the underlying theory. If we start boot-strapping our theory to fit unexpected turns of events, then maybe something is wrong with the theory.
To me, it is an example of a type of thinking where we attempt to think clearly about the consequences and implications of solid, well posed, well observed basic principles rather than seeking quantitative patterns in masses of data. It seemed this was the kind of thinking Thornhill uses. I don't want to create an empiricism vs. analysis-via-first-principles argument because it seems so much of the macro-trap of life is based on a divide and conquer strategy after polarizing 2 rather natural approaches to problem solving. I can't help but think that this type of reflection used by the Austrians and the electric universe advocates has fallen well out of vogue and deserves some serious consideration.