Hey Jeff, I understand now why you ran into the issue in the first place. When creating a new project with previous versions of Android Studio, the kotlin_version variable was created for you automatically. With Arctic Fox, it skips that and instead hard-codes the version for the dependencies.
Short version: you didn’t do anything wrong, the IDE didn’t give you the value that I expected to be there. I’m thinking I’m going to add some errata for the book to tell people the differences with Arctic Fox.