The author states that the talk was inspired by this series of blog posts[1] if you are like me and find articles about technical topics much easier to consume than talks.
Another interesting tangent I've been curious in is networked storage.
The algorithms (protocols like AWS SRD and Infiniband RD) [0][1] and hardware (network gears and protocol specific ASICs or FGPAs) used to get to 100gbps and beyond over tech like RoCE, Infiniband+RDMA, Elastic Fabric Adapter are in themselves interesting for a clear reason that these are complex distributed systems in their own right with high availability, super low latency, and considerable throughput.
Other networking tech enables not just reliable storage over network (either block devices like EBS or filesystems like EFS or Lustre) but also things like content delivery at internet scale [2].
Looks like an interesting talk. Mandatory reference to the DDIA book: https://dataintensive.net/. It features a whole chapter on B+Trees vs LSM, etc. A must read IMHO if you're into this kind of stuff.
If you liked DDIA, you'll love Andy Pavlo's Advanced Database Systems course on the CMU Database Group's Youtube channel. Its about 30 hours long, fairly easy to follow, and focused on state-of-the-art database systems.
[1] https://medium.com/databasss