The government has an advanced research agency that seems to have developed a lot more than they want us to know.

What are they up to? Follow me down the rabbit hole about DARPA.

Thank you. Hello, friends, and welcome back to the rabbit hole.

I'm your host, Danny, and today we are talking about DARPA.

Thank you, Sam and Philippe, for requesting this episode.

And of course, before we get started, I love to thank our sponsors. So thank you, Wise Wolf Gold,

for sponsoring my podcast. Guys, if you want gold and silver delivered straight to your front door for as little as $50 a month, go to rabbit hole.com. Right now. Let's get into it. The Defense

Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is one of the most

influential research organizations in history. They are responsible for technologies that transform

both warfare and everyday civilian life. Darpa was born out of shock, basically, when the Soviet Union

launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, on October 2, 1957,

the United States was taken completely off guard.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Congress scrambled to ensure that America would never again

be surprised by a technological leap from an adversary. So in February

1958, just like four months later or five months later, the Advanced Research Projects Agency,

ARPA, was established under the Department of Defense. Its mission was broad and bold. Pursue high-risk,

high-reward research that no single military branch or private company would take on alone.

They were the research and development team.

The D and DARPA wasn't added until 1972.

Fun fact, they actually removed the D once again from the name in 1993, but then it came back to the name in 1996. So anyway, it was ARPA and then it was DARPA again, and then it was DARPA again. Either way, most people know it as DARPA. It had the initial funding of $520 million. That's almost $6 billion today, just so you know kind of where they started. And again, they were freaking out because the Soviet Union just launched a satellite. The U.S. didn't know what to do.

So they spent a lot of money and energy into DARPA. Eventually, some of that funding did get

turned over to NASA because NASA was established a little bit later in 1958, and it took on a lot of the space stuff and the funding that would go along with it.

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