It isn't clear to me what he's talking about. If you assemble his rig with non bullshit components and replace the lightbulb with a detector of some kind, i'm almost entirely positive that you would see a charge only after [wire length]/c.
But I could imagine that there is something happening, because electric charge weirdly does seem to know where to go. It seems obvious in a wire, but it has always weirded me out that a fault current will return to the transformer it came from. It's should be no different inside a wire, but my monkey brain thinks it makes a difference.