ok so the issue was that all 3 vm's had the same hostname and it was causing some type of connection/authentication error when innodb would try to add an instance to the cluster.

I had made the following changes to my /etc/hosts in ubuntu but for some reason it was not registering the changes and updating the hostname properly:

192.168.20.53 router apps
192.168.20.60 db1 db1.local
192.168.20.58 db2 db2.local
192.168.20.59 db3 db3.local

I had to change /etc/hostname as well for the changes to register.

In /etc/hostname I just went on each instance and deleted the entry that was there and put "db1" for the first instance, "db2" for the second instance and "db3" for the third instance and that resolved it.

I hope this helps anyone who is stuck with a similar issue, ty and have a Blessed day!