The speaker, Drew, introduces a new microkernel called Helios that he has been working on. Helios is written in a programming language called Hair, which also supports the development of other systems like drivers. The goal of Helios is to prove that Hair can be used to write microkernels and to improve upon the design of SEL4. The kernel currently runs on X86-64 and ARM64 architectures, with support for risk 5 planned for the future. The speaker discusses the capabilities of Helios, including capability-based security, interprocess communication using endpoints, and the scheduler. The footprint of the kernel is small, with the portable code being around 8,500 lines of code. The speaker also highlights the future plans for Helios, including SMP support, support for additional architectures, and the development of a larger operating system called Ares. The talk ends with acknowledgements to the hair community, the OSDev community, and the inspiration from SEL4.