Hard to wrap my mind around this one. Anyone have any good analogies that fit?
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Neither is scientific. The only correct thing to say is that we don’t know beyond a certain era of time.
That said, one of the most accepted and evidence driven hypotheses that you are probably referring to is the inflationary epoch. This is not equivalent to the big bang, and the best ELI5 is assume many places in the universe have a bowl with a moving ball in them. For places where the ball jumped out of the bowl, the universe in that region of space expanded faster. In places where it didn’t, it expanded slower.
This happened after the big bang, but not super long after. We don’t have direct evidence of it, but it is theorized to involve an inflation field with properties like that ball in a bowl: as long as the ball remained in the bowl it was stable, but if it got knocked out however it did, it would never jump back in. This is in more advanced terms called a false vacuum state, and the ball falling out of the bowl went to the true vacuum state (the bowl being the false vacuum state, and the table it sits on being the true vacuum state).
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