A World I Dare to Imagine - Final Pitch

Some people argue that money doesn’t make you happy. In fact, there is something else that is much more important and that can actually make you happy – health. Health is the greatest wealth we will ever have. Without our health, our vitality, our best energy, every part of our lives will inevitably suffer. Even when we don't know it. Health is definitely the most precious of the achievements that we have reached so far as a humanity. Yet it is still precarious, thus we need to protect and defend it as much as we can.

Having spent my whole life in Italy, I’m perfectly aware that cigarette usage in Europe is insane, especially among teenagers and young adults. And I found a very similar situation when I first arrived in the United States where the only difference is that “Juuls” are preferred to cigarettes. Smoking has become a cliché among the younger generations and it needs to be eliminated as soon as possible; otherwise, it will become a vicious circle. Throughout my life, I have never been able to conceive why so many young people around me would take up smoking, causing irreparable damages not only to their own health but also to the people surrounding them. I have always seen it as taking an invaluable gift and throwing it directly into the bin. And doing it on purpose.

I feel this is unfair towards yourself, towards your community, and towards those low-income people in less developed countries who cannot even afford access to basic healthcare and who would give anything for good health. Health that we benefit from just because we had the privilege of being born in a relatively wealthy family and in a developed country. Smoking not only increases the chances of contracting a wide variety of diseases which can eventually cause death, but it represents an enormous burden for society. Tobacco kills up to half of its users, which are approximately 1.1 billion worldwide. Just cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 6 million deaths per year. What’s more, it results in around 890,000 deaths from secondhand smoke exposure and more than $300 billion in expenses for treatments against smoking-related illnesses each year only in the United States. It is clear that tobacco users need help to quit.

The world I dare to imagine is, therefore, a world where human beings will live a healthy life. In order to achieve this goal, I want to give my own contribution to society in the fight against smoking. This is the reason why at a certain point in my life I will start my own business to help tackle this problem, first focusing on my own community and then expanding to the global market. The name of my company will be “AurA” and it will revolutionize the smoking industry. It won’t be the usual company producing sophisticated electronic cigarettes that releases a flavorful nicotine-containing tobacco vapor without combustion. I want to go a step further and create a device that releases just clean air, hence the name “aura” which means “air” in Latin. I envision a world where people who smoke cigarettes have the tools to reduce and eventually eliminate their consumption of nicotine entirely.

Let me explain better what the actual product will look like. Imagine a Juul or any other electronic cigarette, but instead of pods containing cigarette-like strength nicotine, it will be provided with pods containing pure air. Users will be able to breathe the air both through their mouth and through their nose, in order to enhance their experience when inhaling the air. There will be different “flavors” of air coming from various places on Earth with the cleanest and purest air in the world, such as Iceland, Tibet, Hawaii and so on and so forth. It will not only help prevent young people from taking up the bad habit of smoking, but it will also help lifetime smokers quit smoking by gradually reducing the content of nicotine. Just imagine breathing air coming from the Italian Alps when you are in the middle of Downtown LA, wouldn’t it be better than smoking?