The Universe Expanded Like a Balloon

Inflation is not, you know, why your money doesn't work as well every year. It's something we call inflation. We take an idea, a word that everybody uses to mean one thing, right? Just like, use that same word to mean something totally different. So the universe inflated that whole balloon inflated and everything inside it got stretched. And the amount of stretching that happened is crazy. That's 10 with 30 zeros on it, some crazy huge number. But space itself was smaller that that much we know. Space was small. The stuff in it was crammed in really, really small. Then about 14 billion years ago, for some reason, do we know why?