100% on the gear.

I started with a couple of $40 Jabra USB headsets + a MacBook. MacOs comes with a built in equalizer that lets you "merge" two inputs into a feed. You can then use Audacity to record one user on the left channel and one on the right.

Again, I didn't know anything about audio processing but with some YouTube videos, Audacity manual + asking an LLM you can really make the audio sound great.

As one extreme, you can literally start a podcast with a phone and whatever audio app is included with the phone.