I took his course at U of T about 15 years ago, before he got famous (and took up permanent residence in crazytown), and can assure everyone who reads this that his grift goes back decades. Examples:
1) He assigned his own textbook (Maps of Meaning) as required reading for the course. Not that unusual in academia, sure, but he would also get a few dozen copies of his book from the publisher, at cost, and bring them into the classroom on a skid to sell them to students, for cash. Retail price. Acted like he was doing us a favour.
2) He charged students to access an "online platform" to complete the required assignments, which were the same assignments he did every year. In previous years, he distributed a Word document via email and had everyone fill in the appropriate sections. Same assignment, just more expensive.
3) The actual assignments for the class were: a) a past autobiography of about 15 pages, divided into the 7 "epochs" of your life; b) a future autobiography of where you see yourself down the road; and c) a very easy multiple-choice exam, drawn entirely from his lectures and book. Half the questions had one-word answers, and it was all graded by Scantron bubbles.
4) Neither he nor his incredibly incompetent TA did any actual grading work. The first two assignments were all peer-evaluated - they literally did nothing except anonymize them and send them out to other students - and the multiple choice exam was so simple that the class AVERAGE was an A-. This was a 4th-year psychology course.
5) His "lectures" - during which he wore an obnoxious white-and-red robe, from his Harvard teaching days - were often rambling and poorly-sourced linkages between different myths and religious tenets, which he then obliquely linked to modern psychology. He would often (mis)quote the Bible, and seemed unable to adjust to the fact that all the students had access to google, and could therefore fact-check him in real time; he was questioned on several occasions about claims he made that were factually incorrect and would always change the subject. he rarely, if ever, cited sources, and spoke with such an inflated sense of self-assuredness that he couldn't even comprehend how he might ever be questioned on his views.
5 ctd.) His "lectures" often consisted of analyzing religious themes in films, and he spent the entirety of two full lectures analyzing - I shit you not - Disney's Pinocchio. There were 12 lectures in the semester, and I'm pretty sure he missed at least two of them. For this, the man was paid a mid-six-figure salary by U of T.
The man never espoused an original or groundbreaking thought during the entire semester. He did, of course, rail against any cause he disregarded, including (but not limited to) feminist critiques of the Bible, political correctness, Marxism, "Facebook-Friend lifestyles", and of course the breakdown of social structure vis-a-vis the end of traditional family values. He also had a habit of pausing for 5-10 seconds with his fingers against his temple, scowling down at the ground as if collecting his thoughts for some insight he was preparing to share... and then pivoting into a bizarre rant about something entirely unrelated to the previous topic.
This man is decidedly not a genius. He is, however, a gifted orator, with a loud enough voice and small enough sense of humility to feel comfortable saying anything that comes into his mind, in a way that impresses those who don't look too far beneath the surface of his words. From a far enough distance, he can be mistaken for an intellectual; the closer you get, the more obvious it becomes that he's no more than a narcissistic charlatan in a fancy robe.
Sources: my course notes, which I still have saved on an old external hard drive.