according to the screenshots zay posted, he spent most of it on licensing c-span footage. according to his claim of $66 per second, that means he paid that much for around 37 seconds of footage.
there are multiple ways around that. if he's giving any type of analysis or making it transformative in anyway it should fall under fair use. he also could have just quoted the damn video if it was less than a minute and just cited it in his notes if he was that scared of C-SPAN coming after his video revenue.
i don't have the details on whatever video he's talking about so I can't say precisely, but to me it just sounds like he whining about the costs that he really shouldn't have had to pay and he might lack creativity to make his content transformative.