The talk discusses the concept of self-hosting in the context of hardware and software development. The speaker explores the importance of self-hosting, the different layers of hardware, and the trade-offs between ASICs and FPGAs. They then proceed to demonstrate a slow, memory-constrained computer running Fedora Linux on a rocket chip CPU and FPGA. The computer is capable of rebuilding its own bitstream and is a self-contained, self-hosting system. The speaker also highlights the challenges and potential future advancements in hardware development, such as democratizing chip fabrication.