If they get paid off profits after expenses then they technically do pay for expenses.
It seems like Joe runs his podcast as inefficiently as possible. There's no reason he needs to pay 4 different people to do editing, uploading, and whatever screenman does. Podcasting is not very expense, what was Joe doing wrong where he has this high overhead cost just for a podcast?
He should have been bringing in millions a year before the spotify deal with how big the podcast was, but dude is so bad at business he failed to consider revenue streams.