The talk is worth watching, but is based on a single big "trick" (but really language feature).

The key thing shown in this talk to unlock all the other cool patterns is that a nil channel blocks indefinitely in a select statement, meaning it is never selected. So you can set channels to nil in order to "turn off" certain code paths in a select. Example:

    var myChan chan int
    if someCondition {
      // Turn on case by setting the channel
      myChan = someChannel
    }

    select {
    case <-myChan:
      // Do a thing. Will never execute if myChan is nil.
    // ... etc.
    }