Wow that is actually pretty impressive..
To dissect this effect would probably take some major effort, but I’ll give it a go..
You could make the text objects into pictures and use a particle engine like Particular (trapcode) to spin them about, or do it manually.
There was a thread on here a month or so back about making “layers get sucked into a tornado” – the technique for that would probably work for this if you chose the manual method…
Other than that I’m pretty clueless – I havent tried anything like that yet..
Good luck
-Jeremy