When I rebooted my podcast last year, Auphonic was a great discovery. It does a lot of cleanup and leveling with zero effort that, in some cases, could take hours of work previously if the volume levels varied a lot for whatever reason.

It's still good to get a decent quality recording. But seeing all the people who do video and broadcasts from trade show floors and the like got me to a point where I don't sweat it if I don't have pristine near-studio conditions. As long as I get interesting guests, 20-25 minutes of conversation IMO comes out pretty well without a huge amount of work.