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He didn't say that bus riders are less intelligent. If you talk to a random person they are pretty dumb, and you find random people at busses. There isn't more to it than that.

Personally I experienced the average person when I did my military duty. Most people were forced to attend so you got a good slice of what society looks like. And yes, the average person there wasn't that bright, the discussions I heard there was the dumbest I've ever experienced.

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> If you talk to a random person they are pretty dumb, and you find random people at busses.

No, that's not how randomness works. If you talk to sufficiently many random people, you will likely get a wide distribution of people.

Besides, talking to strangers is not a good measure, because people are often guarded around strangers. Especially on the bus, I thought people who tried to talk to me out of the blue were a bit strange and to be avoided.

It's also not random. I've talked a couple of times in my life to strangers in public transport, well, they actually talked to me, both times somehow accidentally people who I talked to were IT professionals, one was a programmer, the other one was a sysadmin and it was in the 90s in former soviet republic, hard to randomly encounter such people back then.

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