Aldous’ spectral gap conjecture asserted that on any graph the random walk process and the interchange process have the same spectral gap. In this talk I will review the work in collaboration with T. M. Liggett and T. Richthammer from 2009, in which we proved the conjecture by means of a recursive strategy. The main idea, inspired by electric network reduction, was to reduce the problem to the proof of a new comparison inequality between certain weighted graphs, which we referred to as the octopus inequality. The proof of the latter inequality is based on suitable closed decompositions of the associated matrices indexed by permutations. I will first survey the problem, with background and consequences of the result, and then discuss the recursive approach based on network reduction together with some sketch of the proof. I will also present a more general, yet unproven conjecture.