I will review recent work on understanding 3d gravity as a random ensemble. I then introduce an extension of the model by introducing various new objects in the bulk, which would then describe an ensemble of BCFTs (CFTs with boundaries). We will derive certain important results that establish the validlity of the model and discuss some unproven conjectures. The richness of the model will shed light on the nature of the ensemble in lower-dimensional models of gravity, and I will summarize some lessons we learned. The talk will mostly be based on arXiv:2504.12278 but will cover other some related works.

Inviter: Jie-Qiang Wu