I will review some recent attempts at providing a microscopic description for extremal black holes. First, I will explain a constituent model for extremal non-rotating non-BPS asymptoticaly flat black holes. Second, I will summarise the main claims in the so called extremal BH/CFT correspondence, pointing out how a chiral CFT can emerge as a limit of a non-chiral CFT. Finally, I will use R-charge AdS black holes to derive the existence of emergent IR CFTs, similar to the ones that have been argued to capture some interesting quantum criticality phenomena in some strongly coupled condensed matter systems.