Many of the people where I work have little to no idea of what Bitcoin is, a few mention ah yes I saw that on the news a while ago but not quite remembering anything else about it. I got interested in Bitcoin quite late on when the price was up towards the $1k mark and it was on the news quite a bit, this peaked my interest and after looking into it more found out about the tech and the benefits and it introduced me to a whole new world.
I think people just need something to peak their interest, grab their attention and give them that little push to find out about Bitcoin and get past some of the negative info out there.
I saw a few news stories about it and only remembered its name before I took an interest. It took a long time for me to work out that the closest thing to an actual Bitcoin is a private key consisting of a long string of numbers and letters.
It's difficult to explain to a newbie because it's so far removed from physical coins. I thought there must be something tangible you could point at and say that's a Bitcoin. Understanding it's only an entry in a giant file linked to a key is difficult.