Gambling is inescapable these days, with options everywhere from your phones to convenience stores. If you love this, credit Massachusetts. If you think this is a force for bad — blame Massachusetts.

“Scratch & Win” is a new podcast from Boston-based GBH News about how we got here with our gaming/gambling across the country. It turns out Massachusetts has a major role to play through the lottery. Ian Coss is the host of “Scratch & Win.” He spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio, the following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: Sounds like the Bay State was, what should we call it? A cauldron of innovation when it comes to gambling and lotteries?

Ian Coss: Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. A really important thing to understand is that early on, when the state lotteries got rolling in the ’60s and ’70s, these were incredibly conservative agencies. They were terrified of breaking the public’s trust, of getting infiltrated by the mob. So they did not try a lot of new things. What happens in Massachusetts is that the state lottery winds up in the hands of this state treasurer who was kind of a vaudeville guy. He’d literally grown up the son of a vaudeville stage hand. He loved to sing. He had this sort of showman personality.

This is Bob Crane, that state treasurer, singing at a nursing home back in the 1970s. He had this whole group called The Treasury Notes that used to go around and perform.

You can see how the culture in Massachusetts around innovation, experimentation and really entertainment, was very different from the start.

Brancaccio: We think of like drawing ping pong balls in a random drawing when you think of the lottery. But of course, another part of it is the scratch ticket.

Coss: Scratch tickets are the bread-and-butter game of all state lotteries. That’s not just Massachusetts. It’s something like two-thirds of all lottery sales, and that’s $100 billion industry, if you want to call it an industry. And scratch tickets start in Massachusetts. It really is the first and most important of the innovations that happened here. And I spent some time at a convenience store in Quincy, Massachusetts. I met this man who’s a mechanic, who did not want to share his name, but he would come there every day on his lunch break and spend literally hundreds of dollars.

One day when I ran into him, he’d already spent $300 and won nothing. He said he does this because he’s dreaming on hitting the big one so he can retire. He’s 75 years old and has nothing saved for retirement.

And that’s really — I mean, the scratch ticket, if you think about it, that is instant gambling, anywhere, anytime, in the palm of your hand. It started in 1974 in Massachusetts.

Brancaccio: Instant gratification. And how does that vignette help us understand where we are today nationwide?

Coss: Lotteries, they kind of did the political work and a lot of the cultural work of bringing gambling out of the shadows of society and into the open. You know, back in the ’60s, gambling was something you associated either with Las Vegas or the mob. And lotteries, by taking this thing that was vice, that was in the shadows, putting the state’s stamp of approval on it, it really brings it out into the open. And that’s what sets the stage for casino expansion in the 1990s, for states to get into sports betting, and really everything that we’re living in today.