Hokey = contrived, artificial.
By definition, any "model" (for example, the mathematical model to understand the expansion of space) is contrived and artificial.
Just like theories, models are very useful tools to try and understand things that you cannot go and verify by yourself.
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The ORIGIN of the universe is not known. True.
The Big Bang theory (the real one, not what many people think it is: explosion, singularities), says nothing about the origin of the universe.
It merely tries to explain the behavior of the universe by supposing that the expansion of space has an effect on the energy density of the universe.
Same amount of energy + more space to spread it out = the energy density goes down with time.
It is when we use the theory backwards that we come to the conclusion that "from our frame of reference", something special happened 13.8 billion years ago. At that moment (and "before"), we do not understand how things work - including we don't know how time itself flowed at that level of density.
Because the rate of expansion was (relative to our frame of reference) very rapid at that moment, it is still often described as an "explosion" (even though the word "explosion" is NOT appropriate in that context).
And we know the density was NOT infinite at that moment. It was a finite number (a number we can calculate).
Therefore, for all we know, the universe may have been expanding forever before that (because any finite number for density is still exactly 0% of infinity).
This is difficult to grasp for most people, therefore many popularizers still use the analogy of the "explosion" even though it is NOT part of the Big Bang theory.
These two were simply doing the same thing.
Update 2:
It is now quite easy to avoid Carl Sagan.
Since I don't really know Tyson (I do know about him), I guess I am evidence that he too can be avoided.