Wigner meets 't Hooft near the black hole horizon

Recent work on Euclidean quantum gravity, black hole thermodynamics, and the holographic principle has seen the return of random matrix models as a powerful tool. It is explained how they allow for the study of the physics well beyond the perturbative expansion. In fact, a fully non-perturbative treatment naturally unites the familiar approach of summing over smooth geometries of all topologies with the statistical approach to characterizing the typical properties of a Hamiltonian. Remarkably, this leads to an explicit excavation of the underlying microstates of quantum gravity that has applications to the low temperature dynamics of a large class of black holes.