Finding the post authors capability level

I am trying to display content based on the Post Authors capability level.

As a noob I’m having issues getting this to work

<?php
$author_id = the_author_meta('id');
if ($author_id->wp_capabilities['s2member_level1']==1) {
echo "AUTHOR IS LEVEL 1";
}
?>

What this seems to output is the Author ID which is weird. How do I go about testing for this?

Thanks!