#90 – Honest questions from a Stanford student (Sam Corcos & Emma Casey)

Choosing your career can feel like a daunting challenge. How do you know which path you should take? While there’s no cut-and-dried answer, learning from people who have gone before can help you understand your options better. In this episode Sam Corcos, Levels CEO, sat down with Emma Casey, a Stanford student and podcaster for Seed Stage Stories. They chatted about some of the main questions that students tackle like, “What should I study?” or “What should I major in?” and how these questions relate to a student’s career path.

07:20 – Most problems aren’t that hard to solve

A computer science education can help you solve deeply technical issues, but most of the time you don’t need deep technical knowledge to solve everyday issues.

Computer science education is useful if the problems you want to solve are deeply technical problems. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is rare that I encounter a problem where I would’ve needed a computer science degree to be able to solve. Most problems are actually not that hard. It’s an interesting thing the more you get into software development. I would say, if I’m being generous, 90% of all applications are just CRUD apps: Create, Read, Update, Delete. They are some very simple interface layers on the same underlying infrastructure. It’s like, store information in a database, display it in some way, let people manipulate it in some other way. Interfaces are really hard and understanding what makes sense there, but the implementation of a lot of these things is… people often overthink it, like, “What’s the most scalable way to do this,” but it’s really not that hard. Building a very trivial app using Firebase is what most apps are. They’re just slightly more complicated than that. So, there are situations where you’re going to be solving really hard problems.

10:44 – You need to have practical knowledge

Sometimes the simplest solution is the best. If you can look at a problem and find a clear, direct answer, you can cut out a lot of unnecessary complexity.

We had a situation where for getting insights around food, how food affects your health, I said, “What I want to have happen is when somebody eats oatmeal and they have a negative response to it, I want an insight card to pop up that says, ‘That oatmeal that you ate caused this problem. And these are some alternatives that you can have.’” The engineering team responded with, “That’s so complicated. How are we going to know what type of food is a breakfast and how are we going to map those to every kind of alternate that’s relevant?” And I said, “I understand what you’re saying. You’re trying to solve the generalized problem here. What I’m saying is literally just do a string match on oatmeal and then hard code matches against oatmeal.” “Well, that’s really trivial.” I was like, “Exactly. Just do that first.” And so, if I was non-technical or if people making decisions don’t understand complexities and how decisions get made, you can often end up overbuilding things or building things really that don’t need to exist to begin with, because you’re coming at it from a place of ignorance where you just have to accept what people tell you is the truth and you have no way of validating it. So, if people want to be in software, it is absolutely critical, in my opinion, that they understand how software works.

12:33 – CEOs should have a wide skill set

If you have a wide skill set as a CEO, it’s easier to understand the nuts and bolts of the business so you can help it run more smoothly.

For me, as the CEO, it is extremely useful that I have a pretty widely generalist skill set. So, I understand things like business model. I understand how I was able to look at how our books were put together by our bookkeeper, and point out that the way certain things are being categorized was incorrect, and correcting errors within our balance sheet. And that’s great to be able to have somebody who can do that, in the same way that it’s really nice to be able to spot issues with our sales funnel and to be able to improve that. So, I think developing a generalist skill set is super important, but it also, it very much depends on what industry one wants to go into. I do think programming is uniquely valuable in as much as it trains a certain understanding of how to solve problems in an automated way. Once you have that ability of knowing even just a little bit of software to think, you start to approach problems in a different way. You have this really big data set, and in your old life, you might have thought, “Oh, okay. Well, this is going to take me six hours to manually go through them.” But once you’ve built in that programmer mindset, you’re like, “I can write a script to solve this in 10 minutes. And anytime I get new information like this, I can have it run automatically. And then, I don’t have to think about this problem ever again.” So, software enables that in a way that there really is no alternative to solving it that way.

15:08 – Choose your job based on your goals

Going into consulting or finance right after college may seem like the smartest option, but it depends on what you want from your career.

The consulting or finance path is sort of the lazy option, where it’s like, “Oh, don’t think too hard about it. Just do the easy thing,” I think it’s almost always a mistake. There are certainly capable people who go that route and benefit a lot from it. It really does depend on what it is you want. There’s a really good podcast… Braden, who is on our support team, he did a podcast recently where he talks about what it was like joining Levels fresh out of college and joining the support team. And he’s been doing an incredible job of finding ways to add value, and learning about other parts of the company, and taking work off of other people’s plates, so they don’t have to do it anymore. And he’s really found ways to add value in a way that is rare for somebody fresh out of college. And so, I think really finding any way to get involved, and to start adding value, and to learn as much as possible is… I think honestly, support is a really great place to start. Working in support gives people firsthand experience with customers. If you can approach support with a programming background in particular, you can think about how to scalably solve a lot of these problems in a way that support doesn’t always see. And there’s no shortcut to just knowing who customers are and to be able to interact with them.

18:33 – You need a team to solve big problems

You can do a lot as an individual contributor, but if you want to solve complex problems, you’re going to need a team you can trust.

I think the biggest thing that I would say was recognizing how much more leverage there is in building teams. When you’re an individual contributor, even in the scope of some of these consulting projects that I did, I might have a team of a half a dozen contractors or more working with me on the project, but it wasn’t really a team, it was very much like solving a very narrow, specific problem. So, when you get to a point where you realize you want to solve bigger problems, the only way to do that is to leverage your time through adding more people into building teams. So, that was probably the biggest transition point was recognizing that I had to develop those skill sets. And I had to think less about how I could do the work myself and how I could enable other people to do the work.

24:52 – We’re fighting misinformation

There has been a lot of misinformation when it comes to sugar. Many people don’t realize just how bad it is for you.

We’ve grown up on so much sugar. When I started working on this, I thought that what we were fighting was ignorance. And I’m increasingly convinced that the problem is actually decades of intentional misinformation. And so, it is hard to get somebody over the hurdle of “orange juice is not a health drink.” Orange juice is basically soda. It is almost chemically indistinguishable. They both are just liquid sugar and they’re both bad for you. And people will say, “But it has vitamin C, right?” That’s what we’ve been trained to think, the response of “Vitamin C, it must be healthy,” but it’s just not the case. None of this is true and we’ve been conditioned to think that it is. So, it’s going to be a slog, is really the short answer. It’s going to take us a really long time.

34:35 – Know what is and isn’t useful to track

It is possible to have too much of a good thing, even if that good thing is data. Some metrics just aren’t worth tracking.

I think the most important thing is to recognize what is useful to track and what is not. One of the conceits is people just assume that the more stuff you measure, the better, which is kind of true, but more data does not always mean better outcomes of understanding. I think what will become really interesting, we are, I think, at the beginning of the next generation of biowearables, which is the ability to measure molecules in your body in real-time. I think that’s what really is going to start to move the needle on healthcare to give you an understanding of your internal metabolic state and to allow you to take corrective actions to improve your health. I think that is what starts to move the needle. These superficial wearables, which are useful in many ways… I mean, superficial, not in a derogatory term, meaning they’re not under the skin. They’re very limited in what they’re able to measure. I think Abbott announced their Lingo line, which is a series of biosensors that can measure more than glucose. And I think we’re going to see a really significant proliferation in the number of molecules that can be measured in real-time. I think that’s really going to be the thing that boosts the needle on biological observability.

41:45 – Don’t double down on bad ideas

Strong opinions aren’t a bad thing, but you need to be able to understand and accept when you might be wrong instead of doubling down on your theory.

There have been a lot of people that I’ve worked with in the past where they had very strong opinions about things and they just really didn’t know what they were talking about. And it’s one thing to have an opinion and then, when contrary information gets brought to you, you rethink it and you’re like, “Whoa, I guess you’re right.” And maybe you didn’t have a super high level of confidence. You just know that a decision had to be made. The people that I like to work with are those who are sufficiently humbled to recognize that. Probably most of the time, in a startup context, most of the time, you’re wrong. And it’s better to be right than it is to be wrong, but it’s better to be wrong, and to fail quickly, and to be able to move on from it, and to be able to learn from it. Most… I don’t know if I would say “most,” a huge percentage of the failures of early stage companies that I’ve seen is an unwillingness to accept when somebody was wrong and just doubling down on bad ideas because they can’t accept that one of the choices that they made was wrong, and learn from it, and move on to the next thing.

48:26 – Make time for the things that are important to you

Most tasks aren’t as urgent as you think they are, so make sure you’re spending your time on the things that are the most important to you.

Very few things are actually as urgent as people think they are. So, one of the things that I do… Once a quarter, I do a think-week, where I take a week off of work. I don’t do email, I don’t do messaging or at least I do a very minimal amount of it, maybe just in the morning, and then I do the whole rest of the day or week just focused on thinking and writing. Those have been really impactful. So, one week a quarter. But generally speaking, I try to just block off as much time as I can to be able to control my schedule. I’m lucky that we’ve hired a pretty senior leadership team already, so I have a lot more time. And I think it’s typical for a company at our stage to think about these things and to do a lot of writing.

52:15 – Technical know-how helps you make better decisions

If you have technical knowledge about how your company works, it can help you make more informed decisions.

The reason why technical capabilities like learning software is important for being in leadership at a software company is because it allows you to make better decisions and to communicate ideas better. You can understand… This is one of the frustrations that I’ve seen in non-technical founders when they interact with their engineering team. Engineers are… they don’t usually use big words with the intent of confusing people, but a lot of the stuff that they do is not tractable to people who don’t know anything about programming. If a non-technical founder went to an engineer and said, “Hey, why is this project taking so long,” the engineer says, “Oh, well, you know, we ran into this authentication issue where we had to set up a bastion host to set up the authentication through a different server in order to bypass this problem that we have.” Those words don’t mean anything to that person. And they don’t understand, is that hard? Is that easy? Was this necessary? They feel patronized if they don’t understand the language that other people are using. So, if you’re in a technical role, to be able to communicate to the people who are making decisions and who are doing things, it’s really important to know the language that they’re using, otherwise you’re just going to… it’s going to create a tremendous amount of unnecessary tension with other business units.

Emma Casey (00:06):

There’s not really a delineation between learning how to write and learning how to think. And so, when schools cut back on a lot of the really foundational courses of teaching students how to write, it’s not that they’re missing out on the skill of not being able to format an essay, it’s a lot of that critical thinking.

Ben Grynol (00:32):

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health. And this is your front-row seat to everything we do. This is A Whole New Level.

Ben Grynol (00:58):

Every week, many of the Levels team members get inbound messages. Some are sales related; others are people looking for advice, different founders, different startup, functional leaders, people across many parts of the stack. And occasionally, we’ll get messages from people that are in school. “Hey, what can I study?” “What should I major in?” “How should I think about my career?” “Do you have 15 minutes for a chat?” In most cases, we end up recording Looms. We send back these messages that give people feedback or give people advice, and whomever gets a message will respond and say, “Hey, here’s my take. Hopefully this helps.”

Ben Grynol (01:33):

Well, in some cases when messages are long, and thorough, and thoughtful, sometimes it’s easier to have a conversation about it. But because we are remote, because we’re asynchronous in the way we communicate, booking time is not our default. Having meetings is not what we do. In a special case, Emma Casey, who’s currently a student at Stanford, she reached out cold to Sam Corcos, co-founder and CEO of Levels, and said, “Do you have time for a chat?” Well, Sam thought, “If you want your questions answered, why don’t we turn this into a podcast and I’ll answer your questions in real-time.” And so, here’s where they kick things off.

Emma Casey (02:16):

I think in December of last year, I sent you an email about how I was a freshman in college, someone interested in what Levels is doing trying to solve the metabolic health crisis in the U.S. And sort of from digging into the company, I came across your LinkedIn profile. And I thought it was interesting that someone that was leading this category-defining digital health company didn’t really have a ton of background in human biology. And if I’m correct, you majored in econ in college.

Sam Corcos (02:50):

Yup.

Emma Casey (02:51):

And so, yeah, I’m someone thinking about a lot of those same things right now. I’m studying a combination of computer science and economics, but yeah, I just thought you had a really interesting path to entrepreneurship, particularly in this space, and thought it could be cool to ask you a few questions about it.

Sam Corcos (03:10):

Yeah, totally. I tried taking some computer science courses when I was in college, but I’m hoping that the curriculum has evolved a lot because it was really academic and not particularly useful. I got into programming. Actually, I learned programming after I graduated and really enjoyed it. I subcontracted a lot of work for some of the consulting projects I was doing to my brother who is also a programmer. And at a certain point, he basically just said, “You know, these things you are asking me to do, which are mostly web-scrapers and small projects, these are really not that hard. Probably just do it yourself.” So, I started doing more and more of those projects and yeah, the rest is history. I’m very lucky in the things that… Programming is what I would do in my free time. And it just happens to neatly coincide with things that make money. So, not everybody is so lucky.

Emma Casey (04:10):

Yeah. It’s funny because… especially, I go to Stanford, so it’s a very tech, computer science heavy school. There are a lot of people who grew up coding and had a spare Raspberry Pi in their bedroom, but I came to it a lot later, but, I mean, luckily, our computer science classes, at least the ones I’m taking, aren’t super theoretical. I’m taking a class on web development with JavaScript and the core is in C. So, I guess that’s not as directly applicable, but yeah, I just realized that, especially when comparing it side to side with a lot of my standard problem sets in other classes where you’re essentially regurgitating an example from the textbook, there was a lot more creativity and problem-solving in programming and some of the other things.

Sam Corcos (05:05):

Yeah. I think project-based learning for programming, it’s an interesting thing. I wrote an article with my friend Lewis on this a few years ago on the difference between programming and computer science. I think they really should be thought of as distinct things. Computer science is math. It’s the underlying complexity of the sums. And programming is much more like learning a foreign language. It’s a logical system of expressing yourself. I found that for most people, it takes about a month to get past that point where it looks like the matrix, and where you start to understand what the language means and how to solve problems, even if they’re really trivial problems, but it’s not that hard to get past that. I often try to explain to people that programming languages are kind of like spoken languages, except that there are far fewer words and they are written by humans intentionally to be logical. Whereas, most foreign languages are just sort of this random spontaneous thing that occurred over millennia, programming languages are actually much, much easier to learn.

Emma Casey (06:14):

Hmm. And so, if programming isn’t necessarily something that you need a computer science degree for, let’s say, if you want to be someone that eventually has the ability to take an idea and translate that into a tangible product, I guess, what are your thoughts on the value of a college degree, and maybe how to think about what to use your limited units to study, and maybe how you thought about that when you were in college?

Sam Corcos (06:44):

If I’m being honest, I was immensely bored in college, which is why I played so many sports. I did football, rugby and track in college to fill my time. There were several classes that I really liked. I think my favorite course in college was Advanced Corporate Finance with Lisa [Muriel Brooke 00:07:05]. It’s a graduate level course, but it was super, super interesting. I think a lot of it was format. It was case study based, kind of like you would have at graduate school. I think it depends a lot on what kinds of problems you want to solve. Computer science education is useful if the problems you want to solve are deeply technical problems. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is rare that I encounter a problem where I would’ve needed a computer science degree to be able to solve. Most problems are actually not that hard.

Sam Corcos (07:42):

It’s an interesting thing the more you get into software development. I would say, if I’m being generous, 90% of all applications are just CRUD apps: Create, Read, Update, Delete. They are some very simple interface layer on the same underlying infrastructure. It’s like, store information in a database, display it in some way, let people manipulate it in some other way. Interfaces are really hard and understanding what makes sense there, but the implementation of a lot of these things is… people often overthink it, like, “What’s the most scalable way to do this,” but it’s really not that hard. Building a very trivial app using Firebase is what most apps are. They’re just slightly more complicated than that. So, there are situations where you’re going to be solving really hard problems.

Sam Corcos (08:39):

An example I would give is my brother is more of a computer scientist. He was the first engineer at Notion and built a lot of the code base there. And he is much more technical than I am. He’s the kind of developer where… When you get into these weird nuanced bugs, there was one particular issue where I was coding a front-end. And I had this weird issue where I was animating an image and it was getting weirdly pixelated as it moved. And I remember asking my brother, “Do you have any idea why this would be the case?” And he was like, “Oh, yeah. Open up Chrome DevTools,” so I did, and he said, “Press escape.” And there’s a second secret menu in Chrome DevTools, which I didn’t even know existed that you had to go into to find what was going on there. He was like, “Oh, yeah. It has to do with your rendering layers.” I was like, “Oh, man!”

Sam Corcos (09:32):

This is a level of programming that I’m not going to have to do very much of, but most of the time… I think I got into programming, a lot of it was because I really liked it, but my skill set is really as like a generalist CEO. And so, being good at programming, if you want to work in software, you need to know how to code stuff. There are a lot of CEOs who work in software companies that are non-technical and some of them do well. I think if your core competency as a CEO is sales and you have a really good technical leader, that’s probably fine. But I think that in general… This was a saying from Tony Hsieh’s book. He’s a founder of Zappos. His book was Delivering Happiness, and the quote was “Never outsource your core competency,” which I think is really important. And if you intend to be in software, you really need to know how the sausage is made to be able to make good decisions.

Sam Corcos (10:34):

There have been so many times when being able to look at a problem, and quickly understand the complexity of it, and saying, “Okay, I…” In fact, this happened recently at Levels. We had a situation where… for getting insights around food, how food affects your health, I said, “What I want to have happen is when somebody eats oatmeal and they have a negative response to it, I want an insight card to pop up that says, ‘That oatmeal that you ate caused this problem. And these are some alternatives that you can have.’” The engineering team responded with, “That’s so complicated. How are we going to know what type of food is a breakfast and how are we going to map those to every kind of alternate that’s relevant?” And I said, “I understand what you’re saying. You’re trying to solve the generalized problem here. What I’m saying is literally just do a string match on oatmeal and then hard code matches against oatmeal.”

Sam Corcos (11:32):

“Well, that’s really trivial.” I was like, “Exactly. Just do that first.” And so, if I was non-technical or if people making decisions don’t understand complexities and how decisions get made, you can often end up overbuilding things or building things really that don’t need to exist to begin with, because you’re kind of coming at it from a place of ignorance where you just have to accept what people tell you is the truth and you have no way of validating it. So, if people want to be in software, it is absolutely critical, in my opinion, that they understand how software works.

Emma Casey (12:08):

Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense and… I don’t know. From what you’re saying, it sounds like, in your role, it’s more important to be able to communicate really effectively with the engineers and think about how to prioritize what they’re building, instead of really getting into the nitty-gritty of the actual tech stack.

Sam Corcos (12:29):

Yeah, for sure. Like I said, it depends on one’s goals. For me, as the CEO, it is extremely useful that I have a pretty widely generalist skill set. So, I understand things like business model. I understand how I was able to look at how our books were put together by our bookkeeper, and point out that the way certain things are being categorized was incorrect, and correcting errors within our balance sheet. And that’s great to be able to have somebody who can do that, in the same way that it’s really nice to be able to spot issues with our sales funnel and to be able to improve that. So, I think developing a generalist skill set, super important, but it also, it very much depends on what industry one wants to go into.

Sam Corcos (13:26):

I do think programming is uniquely valuable in as much as it trains a certain understanding of how to solve problems in an automated way. Once you have that ability of knowing even just a little bit of software to think, you start to approach problems in a different way. You have this really big data set, and in your old life, you might have thought, “Oh, okay. Well, this is going to take me six hours to manually go through them.” But once you’ve built in that programmer mindset, you’re like, “I can write a script to solve this in 10 minutes. And anytime I get new information like this, I can have it run automatically. And then, I don’t have to think about this problem ever again.” So, software enables that in a way that there really is no alternative to solving it that way.

Emma Casey (14:14):

I’m curious how you developed that generalized skill set because a lot of times when I talk to people… and I think, generally, when… let’s say, a college student comes up to someone and they said, “I’m generally interested in business and problem-solving, but I don’t know exactly where to go from that,” I think a lot of people say, “Oh, go do consulting for two years.” But I know you didn’t do that. And for me, I don’t know, I’m someone that’s really attracted to the opportunity for impact, and consulting in some ways seems to me like the antithesis of that. I mean, I know people do have really valuable experiences there, but yeah, what are your thoughts on that?

Sam Corcos (14:57):

Yeah. I think that there’s a great book, Andrew Yang’s book, Smart People Should Build Things, which I highly recommend to people. It’s a book that I wish I read when I was in college. The consulting or finance path as sort of the lazy option, where it’s like, “Oh, don’t think too hard about it. Just do the easy thing,” I think it’s almost always a mistake. There are certainly capable people who go that route and benefit a lot from it. It really does depend on what it is you want. There’s a really good podcast… Braden, who is on our support team, he did a podcast recently where he talks about what it was like joining Levels fresh out of college and joining the support team. And he’s been doing an incredible job of finding ways to add value, and learning about other parts of the company, and taking work off of other people’s plates, so they don’t have to do it anymore. And he’s really found ways to add value in a way that is rare for somebody fresh out of college.

Sam Corcos (16:04):

And so, I think really finding any way to get involved, and to start adding value, and to learn as much as possible is… I think honestly, support is a really great place to start. Working of support gives people firsthand experience with customers. If you can approach support with a programming background in particular, you can think about how to scalably solve a lot of these problems in a way that support doesn’t always see. And there’s no shortcut to just knowing who customers are and to be able to interact with them.

Sam Corcos (16:40):

In the early days of Levels, I personally had 30-minute calls with, I think, 500 or 600 people in the first year, just to figure out who they are, what motivates them. There’s no shortcut to talking to customers. I still today do a monthly community call with 5 or 6 of our members every month, just to learn more about how they’re experiencing with it. So, some of those things are just muscles that you have to flex. I think being comfortable with failure, trying things, and trying to get it shipped, and getting rejected constantly, that is a skill that not everybody develops, but it’s a really important one.

Emma Casey (17:22):

Yeah. And I also read that you went through YC with another company and I was wondering what made you pivot from being a developer to an entrepreneur?

Sam Corcos (17:39):

Yeah. As a developer, I was doing a lot of contract work. And so, you kind of are an entrepreneur in that regard; you’re not really working on your own projects, you’re working on somebody else’s project. And it’s a funny thing because I remember at the time, a lot of my friends who were working at companies would tell me how jealous they were that I don’t have a boss and I can work whatever hours I want, whenever I want. And I would explain to them that, “It’s actually more like, when you’re doing client work, you really have a hundred bosses. Every client is your boss and you don’t really get to control how bad they are. So, it’s almost like having way more bosses. And a lot of them are the worst bosses you’ve ever had.” But even so, it was a huge learning experience to be able to do that, and to get more cycles, and shipping things.

Sam Corcos (18:33):

I think the biggest thing that I would say was recognizing how much more leverage there is in building teams. When you’re an individual contributor, even in the scope of some of these consulting projects that I did, I might have a team of a half a dozen contractors or more working with me on the project, but it wasn’t really a team, it was very much like solving a very narrow, specific problem. So, when you get to a point where you realize you want to solve bigger problems, the only way to do that is to leverage your time through adding more people into building teams. So, that was probably the biggest transition point was recognizing that I had to develop those skill sets. And I had to think less about how I could do the work myself and how I could enable other people to do the work.

Emma Casey (19:22):

Hmm. If I’m remembering correctly, your first venture wasn’t directly related to health. I don’t know. I’ve heard this story on another Levels podcast that the reason why Josh became pretty interested in the space was his personal experience, working crazy long hours at SpaceX and having to reconcile the fact that even though he was this CrossFit trainer, he wasn’t really healthy at the time. And so, I don’t know, what’s your story of why… Because as a co-founder and CEO, you’re really dedicating so much… I mean, a pretty decent part of your life to solving this problem. And so, what’s your why for Levels?

Sam Corcos (20:10):

Yeah. So, I took a year off work after CarDash. And I spent a lot of time reflecting and thinking about what problems I cared about solving. And I narrowed it down to a list of four or five things and one of them was health. It was a problem that I recognized was not only bad, but getting worse. The second derivative was positive of metabolic dysfunction. I was looking… I think at peak, I was working on 16 different projects in some part-time capacity during that year off to try to understand what was the highest leverage thing I could be doing.

Sam Corcos (20:53):

It was when I wore a glucose monitor myself. For me, it was less about health, it was much more about lifestyle. I had this sudden recognition that my standard healthy breakfast which was steel-cut oats, which I’d always believed is the healthiest thing you can eat, and I recognized that it was the source of my midday crash and the reason why I couldn’t focus in the middle of the day. That was a recognition that… I’m somebody who pays a lot of attention to this stuff, I’ve read a lot of books on health, I assumed that I knew what was healthy, and I was doing things that were actively harmful, and I didn’t even realize it, which led me to think that this is a… glucose monitoring, specifically, was a tool that gives people… it’s the first closed-loop system for diet and behavior. So, that was a recognition that this was a leverage point in showing people how food affects their health.

Sam Corcos (21:51):

So, I spent a little bit more time working on this with Josh. The deeper I got into it, the more I realized how much potential this had to really change the market. So, basically, we got to a certain point, and I thought about how impactful it could be, and we started working on it. So, that was the thought process.

Emma Casey (22:13):

Yeah. I don’t know. Just to like double click on the part where you were saying, you were eating oatmeal because your intention was to be healthy. And I think… I don’t know. I’m someone that’s a bit of a health enthusiast and I was doing the same exact thing last year. Like, I would have overnight oats in my case for breakfast every single day. And so, I don’t know, I think when it comes to behavior change, that direct feedback loop in something that you can see and that’s measured, it’s a powerful source of information for someone to want to change their behavior too.

Sam Corcos (22:49):

Yeah. And it really does change a lot based on who the person is. My sister-in-law has oatmeal in the morning and has no issues. She does really well with oatmeal. My brother and I, we both have largely the same response, which is if we eat oatmeal for breakfast, I’m going to have to take a nap around 12:00 and it will wreck my entire day. What was interesting is, a couple years ago, before I started measuring this stuff, it really had never occurred to me that things that I ate could affect how I feel, which sounds kind of silly, but I just assumed that it has to be caffeine, or sleep, or hydration, or something, but food is just calories or calories, right? It shouldn’t matter what I eat. And it was really just completely wrong. What you eat has a tremendous impact on how you feel throughout the day.

Emma Casey (23:42):

Yeah. That’s also something that took me a while to realize. And I think a lot of people my age will laugh at if you… I don’t know. It’s just not something that young people think about. So, in high school, I was a pretty serious athlete. Then, I thought that I wanted to play soccer in college. But when I remember back at my high school diet, I come home really hungry after practice, I’d have two bowls of cereal, maybe some mac and cheese. My diet essentially consisted of these ultra-processed carbohydrates and sugar. And because I think, among people that listen to health podcasts and are reading the Levels blog, it’s pretty easy to want to actually implement those behaviors and change how you view food, but what do you think the path is to getting… I don’t know. People who are maybe my age, 19, in just what they’ve learned about the food system is this idea in elementary school, we are taught the food pyramid where… with whole grains should be making up the majority of your diet.

Sam Corcos (24:50):

Yeah, it’s tough. We’ve grown up on so much sugar. When I started working on this, I thought that what we were fighting was ignorance. And I’m increasingly convinced that the problem is actually decades of intentional misinformation. And so, it is hard to get somebody over the hurdle of “orange juice is not a health drink.” Orange juice is basically soda. It is almost chemically indistinguishable. They both are just liquid sugar and they’re both bad for you. And people will say, “But it has vitamin C, right?” That’s what we’ve been trained to think, the response of “Vitamin C, it must be healthy,” but it’s just not the case. None of this is true and we’ve been conditioned to think that it is. So, it’s going to be a slog, is really the short answer. It’s going to take us a really long time.

Sam Corcos (25:40):

Part of it is what is… I was talking with my friend Dylan about this the other day. And I think some of this is maybe because of the way that I was raised in California. My parents thought a lot about health. My dad stayed at home and cooked. So, I ate pretty well growing up. And for us, there was normal food, which was, I don’t know, salmon and broccoli. And then there was junk food, which is pizza and all this other stuff. And Dylan, who grew up with less means, he would say that where he grew up, which is how most people in the country are, for him, normal food is pizza and hamburgers, and health food is that weird stuff that weird people eat. It’s the idea of eating a salad, or quinoa, or whatever it is, it’s like, “Oh, that’s the thing that those weird hippies eat. I don’t eat that. I eat normal food.” What our perception of “normal” is has changed a lot.

Sam Corcos (26:40):

I think that for people in our spheres, we’re largely ignorant to how most of the rest of the country thinks about food. The amount of sugar… When you go to, say, a dinner at a friend’s house in San Francisco or New York, it’s almost the default that it’s going to be pretty low carb. It’s going to be pretty low carb. There’s not going to be sugar and everything. That’s just the default. Nobody even says like, “Yeah, I’m trying to stay at low sugar,” because everybody just is low sugar. Everywhere else in the country, it’s the opposite of that. Everything is loaded with sugar. People eat so much sugar and it’s a completely different mindset. I try to explain this to people: Close to 12% to the U.S. population right now is type 2 diabetic, or is a diabetic of some kind. Most of them are type 2 diabetic. It’s like 1 in 10 people.

Sam Corcos (27:33):

I don’t think I know a single person who is type 2 diabetic. And that’s not… that can’t be random. This is extremely concentrated in certain populations and certain communities. And so, figuring out how to penetrate into those groups and get people to understand… I can tell you it pains me when I see these sugary cereals advertised to children. It makes me upset and I don’t think there’s anything that can really be done about it. That’s the world that we live in. Dr. Lustig, Rob Lustig, who’s one of the thought leaders in this space, talks a lot about how type 2 diabetes was a… it was considered a disease of aging for a long time. They used to call it “adult onset” because it was a thing you get when you’re, like, 60 years old and your pancreas stops working because you’ve eaten too much sugar.

Sam Corcos (28:27):

And I think he gave this statistic, something like, “50 or so years ago, 2% of people over 60 had diabetes. And it was the disease of aging. It’s now a thing that five-year-olds get. Five-year-olds will have fatty liver disease and diabetes. This is not normal. Our diet has shifted over to processed foods and to sugar to such a degree that it’s killing us.” You can look at the statistics. It’s mind boggling how much worse things are getting. And the only way to solve this is through better education, people knowing what’s healthy and what’s not.

Emma Casey (29:03):

Yeah. And I think what you’re talking about earlier that almost health-wealth gradient is, I think, even more pronounced when it comes to metabolic diseases. I was actually writing a paper on this last term and a couple studies have found that advertising for highly processed foods is more concentrated in low income areas. And so, yeah, it is a really challenging problem and one that I think… I mean, Dr. Lustig is the exception, but there’s not even large buy-in in a lot of medical communities too. Last year, sort of when I was learning a lot more about this space, I read why we get sick and metabolical… a lot of those types of books. I have an autoimmune disease, so I went to my specialist and I was like, “Hey, I’m really interested in adopting diet as a way to potentially lower my inflammation rather than these pretty intensive medications that I was taking.”

Emma Casey (30:00):

And he looked at me very well meaning and intention and he basically said, “If there was a diet that could fix this, I would tell all my patients ‘Do that’, but unfortunately there’s not.” And so, it took me almost going against what that doctor told me in really making a concerted effort to change my diet. And it was the first time my inflammation levels were lower in three or four years. But I mean, in our circles, I’m sure, because we are really interested in this space, it seems like everyone understands that food has a very material impact on your well-being, your energy, but when you take a step back and look at it in the context of the average American, even maybe the average doctor, I still don’t think that’s the case.

Sam Corcos (30:51):

Yeah. And there were a lot of reasons for that. Most of them are benign. Almost all doctors went into that industry to help people. And so, they’re not trying to harm anybody, but there’s a saying that, I think it’s that “It takes 17 years for any new information to make it into the medical mainstream.” It’s because they take what they learned in medical school and they don’t really update information. The challenge is that when you’re taught in medical school that a calorie is a calorie… I cannot tell you how many times I’ve talked to doctors about this. They’re like, “The source of calories doesn’t matter. A calorie of protein is the same as a calorie of crystallized sugar.” And it’s just so not true. Our bodies are not bomb calorimeters. It’s that we are a complex system and things that you eat affect you in different ways. So, it’s definitely frustrating to get over that hurdle. I think more doctors are getting on board now. I think this is just going to take a really long time.

Sam Corcos (31:55):

One of the other… there’s a cognitive dissonance here where… I can understand why it’s so hard to accept this for a lot of doctors. You can imagine your charge as a doctor is, first, do no harm. And imagine that, for 20 years, as a doctor, you’ve been telling people that low fat, high sugar is the healthy diet, right? “Low fat, that’s the way to go.” And then, all of these people get diabetes and you’ve been really judgemental of them, of like, “Well, they’re probably just not listening to me. They’re probably not following the diet.” And then, new information comes to light that says, “Actually, you’ve been harming people for a really long time. This is actually because of you.” That can be a really hard pill to swallow. And it’s often easier to just pretend like the new information doesn’t exist and then fight it until you retire. And it is to take responsibility, and to change your behavior, and to change your opinions.

Sam Corcos (32:55):

So, this is a thing that happens with all people. When confronted with information that changes something about what you believe, most people will just fight it rather than accept it. But I think this will change with time. It’s still pretty uncommon for doctors to have a lot of training in nutrition, but it’s becoming more common. So, I think it might take another 10 or so years to make this something that everyone thinks about. But 10 years ago, Rob Lustig was wandering the desert by himself and everyone thought he was crazy, saying that “Sugar was this horrible thing and it was causing all these problems.” And we’re now at the point where at least it is in the mainstream for a certain group of people. And I think it’s only going to become more popularized and more mainstream over time.

Emma Casey (33:45):

This is a pretty big question, but what is your view of how wearable technology can potentially change how we think about healthcare? Because, I don’t know, right now, when you think about Levels, or WHOOP, or maybe the Oura Ring, it’s largely people who are just very interested in their health. But I personally haven’t heard of any of these things being implemented in a clinical setting, but I imagine if there was more widespread adoption at a population level, we could move a lot of the curative costs in healthcare to preventative ones. And so, I know it’s probably not a next two or three years or even decade thing, but what is your vision for the potential of wearable technology in healthcare?

Sam Corcos (34:35):

Yeah, I think the most important thing is to recognize what is useful to track and what is not. One of the conceits is people just assume that the more stuff you measure, the better, which is kind of true, but more data does not always mean better outcomes of understanding. I think what will become really interesting, we are, I think, at the beginning of the next generation of biowearables, which is the ability to measure molecules in your body in real time. I think that’s what really is going to start to move the needle on healthcare to give you an understanding of your internal metabolic state and to allow you to take corrective actions to improve your health. I think that is what starts to move the needle. These superficial wearables, which are useful in many ways… I mean, superficial, not in a derogatory term, meaning they’re not under the skin. They’re very limited in what they’re able to measure. I think Abbott announced their Lingo line, which is a series of biosensors that can measure more than glucose. And I think we’re going to see a really significant proliferation in the number of molecules that can be measured in real time. I think that’s really going to be the thing that boosts the needle on biological observability.

Emma Casey (35:55):

And for someone that maybe doesn’t know a lot about, I don’t know, glucose or health in general, nutrition, let’s say, my roommate or something like that, what advice would you give? Maybe a college student, or like, “Here are some things that you should prioritize when it comes to your health,” or maybe some things that… it’s not super common to do, but it’s actually really important to be thinking about.

Sam Corcos (36:24):

Yeah. I think with almost all of these things, there’s an 80-20 solution to be had here. I think sleep is super important. I would say some base level of exercise, which frankly, just walking is exercise, and just having some amount of movement throughout the day really matters. And I think if you are avoiding processed foods and refined sugar, you’re most of the way there. If you’re solving those things, you’re going to be in good shape. Those are probably the three things that I would most focus on.

Emma Casey (37:00):

Yeah. It’s funny because, I think, college presents a very unique environment for trying to solve for some of those healthy behaviors, because at least where I am, I found that I’m eating healthier than I have in my whole life because dining hall food is very predictable. There’s a salad bar. There’s a type of protein. It’s pretty easy to exercise because you’re walking everywhere and there’s an on-campus gym, but I don’t know. Sleep is one that even though I know it’s so important, there’s sort of this trade-off between being social and taking advantage of college giving you the opportunity to meet so many people and sleeping. And yeah, I don’t know, it is kind of an interesting trade-off, but I think those are definitely three important things to focus on.

Sam Corcos (37:49):

Yeah. And it’s… When you budget your time… This is maybe a controversial statement, but I think the value of college, especially somewhere like Stanford or a top university, probably 90% of the value is all of the people that you meet in your class, probably the vast majority of the value that you’ll get from college. The things that you learn in the classes, you could learn from just reading a book later on. It really doesn’t add that much value. If I were to go back in college, I would’ve spent a lot more time. Even just like a 10-minute conversation with somebody one time in the course of college makes a huge difference when you bump into them a couple years later in San Francisco or in New York and you’re like, “Hey, I know who you are. We’re friendly,” and you can talk to them.

Sam Corcos (38:43):

I don’t even really pay attention to… We have about 40ish people at the company now. I can only name the undergrad, the undergraduate university of, I think, two people on our team. And it’s because I knew them before Levels and I just happened to know that information. I’ve never looked at it. I don’t even know if people in our company have gone to college. It’s really not relevant. What people’s grades are in college, unless you’re planning to go to further education, like a law school, I think grades matter to go to law school. I don’t really know, but grades really don’t matter at all in the professional setting. People only care about how good you are at solving problems. They don’t care… In fact, it’s almost a negative indicator. Somebody who’s gets really good grades in college is probably somebody that was spending too much time studying and not doing the other things that actually mattered.

Emma Casey (39:41):

No, that’s interesting. And I don’t know. At least for me, and I don’t know, I haven’t been at college that long, but definitely the most exciting parts have been just the people you’re exposed to and the different ideas they have. But I’m also wondering… Because you are clearly someone that’s very intentional about building out a team and surrounding yourself with really high caliber people at Levels, and so, I don’t know, let’s say you are someone that wants to eventually build a company and have a really strong team, what are some of the things that you’re thinking about in the back of your head when you’re meeting someone that’s a potential hire? I don’t know, more generally, who are the types of people that you want to work with?

Sam Corcos (40:31):

I think the biggest one is probably humility is especially true for co-founder relationships. It’s really important to be able to have open conversations with people. And there’s… Are you familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect?

Emma Casey (40:53):

Is that the idea that when you know a little bit about something, you think you’re an expert, and the experts know that there’s so much to know that they’re not as confident about it?

Sam Corcos (41:03):

Yep. Yeah, that’s right. It’s a U-shaped curve where the people who know very little think that they know a lot. Then, you get to this middle area, which is where most people are for most things, where they’ve learned enough to know how little they know. And then, you have the actual experts. There are people who actually know things. So, you, at some point, get to the other side of that curve where you become an expert and you actually know a lot more than other people on this. But almost everybody is somewhere in the bottom of that trough or to the left of it towards the ignorance, but overconfident side. There have been a lot of people that I’ve worked with in the past where they had very strong opinions about things and they just really didn’t know what they were talking about.

Sam Corcos (41:55):

And it’s one thing to have an opinion. And then, when contrary information gets brought to you, you rethink it and you’re like, “Whoa, I guess you’re right.” And maybe you didn’t have a super high level of confidence. You just know that a decision had to be made. The people that I like to work with are those who are sufficiently humbled to recognize that. Probably most of the time, in a startup context, most of the time, you’re wrong. And it’s better to be right than it is to be wrong, but it’s better to be wrong, and to fail quickly, and to be able to move on from it, and to be able to learn from it. Most… I don’t know if I would say “most,” a huge percentage of the failures of early stage companies that I’ve seen is an unwillingness to accept when somebody was wrong and just doubling down on bad ideas because they can’t accept that one of the choices that they made was wrong, and learn from it, and move on to the next thing.

Emma Casey (42:53):

Yeah. It’s almost like sunk cost bias, like, you’re so bought in on one thing.

Sam Corcos (42:58):

[crosstalk 00:42:58].

Emma Casey (42:58):

I also wanted to ask you a little bit about some of the books that have been really impactful for the way you think about things. One other thing I noticed when looking into your background is that you link your Goodreads on, I think, your LinkedIn and Twitter. And so, it was sort of fun for me to go through that a little bit. And so, yeah, I know you mentioned Smart People Should Build Things by Andrew Yang, but are there any other books that you wish you had read earlier in life?

Sam Corcos (43:32):

I have to think about. So there was a book that I read pretty early on after college, Tim Ferriss’s book 4-Hour Workweek, sort of a classic. One of the things that was really impactful from that book was… After reading that book, he convinced me that delegation is an important skill to develop. And so, I’ve actually had an assistant working with me for almost nine years now and it was the direct consequence of reading that book. I hired her, I put an ad on Craigslist. Her name’s [Laurie 00:44:07]. I hired Laurie. I didn’t have anything for her to do. I just knew that I needed to practice delegating. And so, I hired her, not really knowing what I would have her do for me. And then over time, I learned how to delegate better, I learned how to give better instructions. I came in with the assumption that if she is not able to do something, it’s not her fault, it’s my fault for not giving her enough context. And so, that was a really good learning opportunity.

Sam Corcos (44:37):

What are some other books that were really impactful? I’d say a really good one is Nonviolent Communication is a really good book about just learning how to communicate with people in a way that is not threatening, that doesn’t trigger a fight or flight response, to do it in a way that’s non-judgmental, interpersonal communication. It is probably the thing that kills the majority of companies. Y Combinator puts out… they have a statistic that, I think, the majority of Y Combinator companies died because of bad co-founder dynamics. And so, when people think that these soft skills of communication are not important, they’re just obviously wrong. It is maybe one of the most important things, learning how to do that effectively. And it also translates into pretty much every other aspect of one’s life.

Sam Corcos (45:30):

Another really good book that’s just a classic is How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie. It’s got to be close to a hundred years old now. It holds up pretty well. And there are some references that are a little bit dated, but a lot of the core principles there are still very much relevant today.

Sam Corcos (45:48):

In the context of a startup, I would say The Lean Startup is probably the best place to start. It’s a really good methodology for thinking about solving problems. But I could go on there. I’ve read like a thousand books.

Emma Casey (46:03):

And now, let’s say, when you’re thinking about your next read or the next podcast you’re going to listen to, how do you find high quality content? Because I think there’s so much out there right now and it’s sometimes hard to cut through all the noise.

Sam Corcos (46:20):

Yeah. I mostly do books. One of my rules, which I found is really helpful is I will not purchase a book unless it is the next book that I’m going to read. So, I won’t purchase it until I have finished the book that I’m currently reading. I used to be overly optimistic in terms of what I would read, and I would say, “Oh, yeah, I should read more on this topic,” and I would buy some books on it. And then, I would try to read them and it would be a grind. And I wouldn’t look forward to reading. Reading was a chore and I just decided that I wasn’t going to do that anymore. And so, right now, I’m finishing a book on political theory, which is interesting.

Sam Corcos (47:00):

And I don’t know what the next book is going to be, but I do have in my Audible library, I have a wishlist of all of the books that people have recommended and it’s probably a thousand books. And so, when I finish this book probably tomorrow, I’m going to go through my Audible wishlist and just think, “What do I feel like reading right now?” And It might end up being a business book, it might be a biography, I really don’t know. Yeah, I don’t plan that far ahead when it comes to reading. Don’t force yourself to read things that you don’t find interesting. That so makes reading less fun. So, it has to be fun.

Emma Casey (47:38):

Yeah. Also, when I was going through some of the books that you had read, I noticed, I don’t know, a couple that I found really impactful too. I read The Ruthless Elimination Of Hurry. And I don’t know. I also saw that you’d read some Augustine and C. S. Lewis. And as someone who is the CEO of a very fast growing company, what are some practices that you use to sometimes slow down and think about your life more holistically and your purpose about… Like, at the end of the day, what do you really want to have changed and have left on the world?

Sam Corcos (48:22):

I think the easiest answer is to just make time for it. Very few things are actually as urgent as people think they are. So, one of the things that I do… Once a quarter, I do a think-week, where I take a week off of work. I don’t do email, I don’t do messaging or at least I do a very minimal amount of it, maybe just in the morning, and then I do the whole rest of the day or week just focused on thinking and writing. Those have been really impactful. So, one week a quarter. But generally speaking, I try to just block off as much time as I can to be able to control my schedule. I’m lucky that we’ve hired a pretty senior leadership team already, so I have a lot more time. And I think it’s typical for a company at our stage to think about these things and to do a lot of writing.

Sam Corcos (49:13):

I actually recently did a podcast with David Perell, “The Writing Guy” on Twitter. And we talked a lot about writing as a medium. And I think people really underestimate how important writing is as a format for consolidating and clarifying one’s thoughts. Writing is a really great way to do that. I’ll often just sit down and write tens of thousands of words in a week, just thinking about different topics. Being really good at writing and expressing yourself is super important. It actually reminds me, I was contacted by Claremont McKenna, my alma mater, about what I think should be part of a curriculum for entrepreneurship.

Sam Corcos (49:59):

And I asked my friend Andrew Jordan, who was early at Twilio, he’s a product leader. And one of the things that he said was, he thinks “the most important course that you could take to be an entrepreneur and to be good at software development or in software companies is creative writing.” And my initial response to that was “That seems totally out of left field and doesn’t make any sense.” The more I thought about it, it is actually really hard to be able to express oneself in writing and to be able to communicate those ideas to other people. Most people are extremely bad at that. And it’s super, super important. It’s especially important in our culture, which is a really deep, long-form documentation culture. A recent memo that Scott, our Head of Product, wrote, which was on the role of directly responsible individuals within the company and how decisions get made within the organization, was 13,000 words. And it was really, really good and it clarified a lot of things that people had questions about. So, getting good at writing is super, super important.

Emma Casey (51:10):

Yeah. Someone once told me that there’s not really a delineation between learning how to write and learning how to think. And so, when schools cut back on a lot of the really foundational courses of teaching students how to write, it’s not that they’re missing out on the skill of not being able to format an essay, it’s a lot of that critical thinking.

Sam Corcos (51:33):

Yeah, [crosstalk 00:51:34].

Emma Casey (51:34):

And I don’t know if someone… I had the chance to interview CEO of the company I worked at during my gap year. And he was essentially saying the same thing that “People always throw around these things like, ‘Oh, to be a great founder, you have to be really technical or you have to be an expert in…’” I don’t know, “‘the vertical you’re focusing on,’” but he was saying that, at the end of the day, he thinks his core competency is being able to articulate a vision and get people bought in on that. And so, yeah, I don’t know, that is something that I think you develop over time is just continually working that writing muscle.

Sam Corcos (52:13):

Yeah, definitely. And I would say the reason why technical capabilities like learning software is important for being in leadership at a software company is because it allows you to make better decisions and to communicate ideas better. You can understand… This is one of the frustrations that I’ve seen in non-technical founders when they interact with their engineering team. Engineers are… they don’t usually use big words with the intent of confusing people, but a lot of the stuff that they do is not tractable to people who don’t know anything about programming. If a non-technical founder went to an engineer and said, “Hey, why is this project taking so long,” the engineer says, “Oh, well, you know, we ran into this authentication issue where we had to set up a bastion host to set up the authentication through a different server in order to bypass this problem that we have.” Those words don’t mean anything to that person. And they don’t understand, is that hard? Is that easy? Was this necessary? They feel patronized if they don’t understand the language that other people are using.

Sam Corcos (53:28):

So, if you’re in a technical role, to be able to communicate to the people who are making decisions and who are doing things, it’s really important to know the language that they’re using, otherwise you’re just going to… it’s going to create a tremendous amount of unnecessary tension with other business units.

Emma Casey (53:46):

Yeah. It reminds me of that information asymmetry problem in economics. Not only is there friction, but it’s almost could erode some of the trust that you’re trying to build [crosstalk 00:53:57] a part of team too.

Sam Corcos (53:59):

Absolutely. Yup.

Sam Corcos (53:59):

For sure.

Emma Casey (54:01):

That’s awesome. Well, I guess I know we’re getting towards the end of our time, but I don’t know, we talked about a lot of things that I found really interesting, but I’m wondering if you had to summarize two or three things that you wish you could have told to your college age self or key piece of advice that were really helpful to you, what would you say?

Sam Corcos (54:26):

If I could go back to myself freshman year and give a piece of advice, I would probably say, “Meet everyone. Figure out who the people are that you’re in college with. Just meet as many people as possible, and just get to know who they are and what motivates them.” I’ve often been surprised at how incredibly valuable even just very small interactions that I had from years ago with somebody, how about five years down the line, became something really important for me. I would probably reaffirm that I didn’t take classes as seriously as a lot of other people did because I sort of recognize how little of a role it would play in my life. So, I would maybe reaffirm that grades are not that important and that you can learn everything that you would learn in college in books whenever you want to. So, I probably would’ve told myself that I should go to fewer classes than I was going to at the time, because the classroom attendance was not the highest, the best use of my time.

Sam Corcos (55:35):

I would say probably also… I think at the time, I really believed, as I guess a lot of people probably do by default, that it’s funny when I see people criticizing, say, Elon Musk is saying, well, he didn’t go to college for engineering, so he’s not a real engineer. You don’t really learn engineering in college. You learn it in the field, you learn it in different capacities. So, I probably would’ve said to my freshman year self that you don’t need to go to a class to learn how to do programming. Just start doing it, and then you’re probably going to like it and you’ll be good at it. I shouldn’t feel this need to have whatever status or validation… validation is for probably the right word, that being a computer science major makes any difference, because it really doesn’t. I actually have no idea how many people on an engineering team have computer science degrees. Might be none.