Hyperfixed - MOORED: A Cautionary Tale

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Become a Hyperfixed Premium member and support independent journalism! Get access to bonus episodes, the hyperfixed Discord, and more!https://hyperfixedpod.com/joinIntrigue on the high seas. I mean on land. LINKS: Jenny Phenix's legal complaint against Villa Vie Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

One of our fellow Radiotopia shows is the award-winning music podcast Song Exploder, where musicians tell the story of how they created one of their songs. This year, Song Exploder has introduced a new series in their feed called Key Change. It's not about songs that people made, it's about the songs that made people who they are. The host Rishikesh Hirway talks to guests about a piece of music that was transformative for them. So far there are episodes with actress Sophie Thatcher on Elliot Smith, with author and

poet Hanif Abdurraqib on The Clash, and with comedian James Acaster on Outcast. Conversations are intimate and a wonderful peek into how music can change the way we see the world and ourselves. KeyChange comes out once a month on the Song Exploder feed. So check it out by searching for Song Exploder on your podcast app or go to songexploder.net slash key change. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman. This is Hyperfixed.

On the show listeners write in with their problems, big and small, and I solve them. Or at least I try. And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't. But, uh, not this week. This week we're doing something a little different. And I know that's also what we said in our last episode. But you know what? We're experimenting. The show's young. We can do whatever we want. There are no rules. As long as it's interesting, right? Even if it's not interesting, we can do what we want there are no rules as long as it's interesting, right?

Even if it's not interesting we can do what we want, but you're not gonna listen So I really wanted to let you in on a story that the hyperfix team has become For lack of a better word hyperfixated on So if you're a premium member you're already one step ahead on this story And if you're not I hate to bake a call to action right into the intro of the episode, but you know, hyperfix.com slash join. We have all kinds of cool extra stuff you can see. We all hang out in our Discord and chat. And we also have bonus episodes. And over on those bonus episodes, we've been talking to this guy named Joe Rhodes. If you only listen to the main feed, you heard one of those episodes a few months ago. But just as a refresher, Joe is a retired journalist, and for the past six-ish months, he's been living aboard a residential cruise ship, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a little apartment on a ship with dozens of other retirees and adventurers, and the plan for this ship is

to cruise around the world, stopping at one exotic port after another every few days for three and a half years. You wake up every day in a new place and I thought, well, that's a pretty good deal. I mean, it was supposed to be a pretty good deal. But the Villavie Odyssey, which is the name of the ship that Joe's on, it's had a few issues, to put it very lightly. The big one is that it simply wasn't ready when they said it was going to be. Like people were just waiting in Europe to get on board, and it didn't set sail until four months after the original launch date.

Then when they did get on the ship, it was nothing like what was promised. The toilets didn't work, the air conditioning was spotty, there was no swimming pool, the Wi-Fi sucked, and there was a deeply inadequate selection of beer, according to Joe. Those problems and the work to resolve them is mostly what we talked to Joe about. But since we started airing these episodes, we realized there's actually a much bigger story here. The story of life aboard the Villavi is one of dreams and desperation. And Joe Rhodes, our resident Villavi voyager, can't be the only person to tell it. And the reason he can't is actually because he's on the ship. You see, one of the things we've learned is that the

Villavi residents can only speak so openly about what's going on without fear of repercussions. And the reason they live in fear is because of what happened to two people. So we decided to reach out to one of those people and hear what she had to say. Hello? Hi, Jenny. It's Sari. How are you? I'm good.

Is this an okay time? This is fine. I'm sitting in my this an okay time? This is fine. I'm sitting in my van in a Cracker Barrel parking lot. That's hyperfixed producer Sari Soffer-Sukenek talking to Jenny Phoenix, who you will note is not aboard the Villavi,

but is on land in a Cracker Barrel parking lot in Florida, which is not where she expected to be in April of 2025. Jenny imagined that by this time she'd be on the open waters, spending three and a half years cruising around the world, hitting bucket list destinations in Greenland, Antarctica, and South America alongside other adventurers like herself. I assumed if I liked it I would go ahead and you know buy a cabin and be on there possibly forever. But like I said we're not talking to her from South America, where the Villavi is now. Because despite being one of the first people to sign up for this cruise around the world,

Jenny was never even able to step foot on the boat. Because they terminated my contract about two days before they actually let people start getting on the ship. Okay, before we get too deep into how this happened, I just wanna say that this story is complicated. And we'll get to this later, but Jenny's situation has made its way to the courts. And while we've talked to her about it,

the owners of the Villa Vie Odyssey didn't wanna comment on something that's actively being litigated. So what you're gonna hear today is very much her side of the story. And for whatever that's worth, that is what we came for. Because we've heard versions of Jenny's story from other people in the Villavi orbit, but they feel very much like cautionary tales.

So we wanted to ask her directly, how did it come to pass that she was banned from the boat, and why is everyone so scared that it could happen to them? Because, I'll be honest, when I first heard about this, I was like, what is the big deal? Having your cruise contract canceled doesn't seem that catastrophic. I mean, sure, it sucks,

but just get on another ship or go home. But guys, Jenny can't go home and she can't hop on another ship. And understanding why she's in this situation requires us to rewind a bit. Back to 2023, when Jenny was a year away from retirement and she was beginning to think about what the rest of her life was going to look like. and she was beginning to think about what the rest of her life was going to look like. I saw the Life at Sea cruise advertised on CNN, on TV, on a world cruise, and I've always

loved cruising. I love anything on the water, so I was very interested, immediately went and did my research on that. Life at Sea was marketed as an ultimate bucket list world cruise. In fact, their website still says that. The company is owned by a Turkish cruise land operator called Murey or Mirai, which I think is the Turkish pronunciation. I'm just going to go with Mirai.

And in March of 2023, Mirai announced that their first ever residential round the world cruise would commence later that year, on November 1st. You know, after some numbers crunching and figuring out how I could, you know, financially do that, I signed a contract with them, and that was gonna be a three-year world cruise. Now, Jenny isn't exactly a rich woman, but she had some savings and she had some physical assets.

So after signing this contract, Jenny immediately started rearranging her financial life to accommodate these three years at sea. I had two businesses. I had already started the process of liquidating my businesses. I had a condo I owned that I rented and someone signed a year's contract and gave me a deposit. The thing is that while Jenny is preparing for this journey of a lifetime, the people organizing that journey, they're realizing they're entirely unprepared.

Just two months after the Turkish company, Mirai, announced the new Life at Sea cruise, things are starting to fall apart. First, they're issued securing a ship. Then one by one, members of the Life at Sea team politely begin stepping away from the project. Actually, one of those people stepped away not so politely. That person was Life at Sea's managing director, Mike Pedersen. In a public post to Facebook, Mike explained that he was

leaving his position with the Turkish company, in part because Mirai's ship was quote un-sea-worthy and then he made an announcement in a very Jerry Maguire moment Mike announced that he was going to be starting his own residential cruise ship and he wanted to know who's coming with me. I'm gonna be starting my own cruise so you can either stay with the life at sea with the Turkish company or you can wait stay with the life at sea with the Turkish company, or you can wait for him, which he had absolutely nothing in place, wait for him to start yet an entirely new company with no timeframe and go with him. And at the time I was already kind of going down a road of no return at this point

Jenny had given up her home her job her source of income She didn't really even feel like there was a choice here Mariah had a plan life at sea had a launch date and so far Mike Pederson had nothing So she decided to stay with Mariah to bet on life at sea She decided to stay with Marai to bet on life at sea. And they were supposed to embark first of November, was the beginning of that cruise, same year. And of course, you know, as we got close to first of November, the first ship the company owned was deemed to be too small.

Someone came in and said, you can't do a world cruise in this ship. It's only meant for little cruises around the Mediterranean. It's not big enough. It doesn't hold enough fuel, blah, blah, blah. So then the Turkish company said, that's okay, no problem. We're buying a bigger ship. And they actually had a contract

on the Adaura from Carnival Cruises. So everything looked great until like the last minute in November The sale of the ship fell through they lied and lied and lied to us After two delays and just two weeks before the most recent departure date life at sea told its passengers The dream was officially dead They had no ship no plan and that put Jenny in a no-win situation. And I had rented someplace like temporarily thinking it was just going to be a few weeks.

So then I was really, you know, backed into a corner. And then Mike Peterson showed up again, announcing his plans for the Villavi Odyssey. Mike Peterson said, Oh, well, my cruise is only like six months away. We're, we're buying a ship. We've picked it out. We're going to be signing the papers and taking possession and like December, you know, and this was, you know, just a couple of months out. Now, the only thing that Jenny knew about Mike Peterson at this point was that he told the Life at Sea people that he'd come up with the whole idea for residential cruising, the itinerary, the whole concept, which who knows. She also knew that he'd left Marai on not so great terms. After Mike called their ship un-Sea-worthy, they sued him for defamation. Still embroiled in that lawsuit, he recruited a bunch of ex-Life at Sea workers and started his own company. That was Villa V Residences.

He even went on Fox Business News to sell his vision. We've put together a product where we just charged one price and you're guaranteed an ocean view cabin for life. I'm sorry, Mike, I get a great pool. I get to travel across the world and see different locations, different backyardsyards to your point Great entertainment the way Mike pitched it the villa V offered a life that was more economical than the one on land He talks about it being a kind of refuge from the anxieties of inflation

Almost a safe haven for people on fixed incomes and this is a critical point Because when you hear about what Jenny and so many other people did to get on one of these ships, it's easy to think they were acting irresponsibly. That by liquidating their businesses and selling or renting out their homes, they were putting all of their eggs in this one basket. But the way that Mike talks about it, that doesn't sound so scary. He sold it as one fixed price and you're set for life. So I can understand why so many retirees decided to sell off their assets to join him on this journey. As for Jenny, at this point,

she didn't have a lot of other options. So it only made sense for me to go with that cruise and find, you know, take care of myself, find a place to live for the next four to six months until that cruise was ready to leave. So I did. So I ended up kind of bouncing around and couch surfing and here I am, a 65 year old couch surfing.

Taking care of myself my entire life, you know? And now I'm literally just in nowhere land, you know, stayed with my daughter for a little bit. And then I thought I had a place rented and I live in Southern Florida. So that's season in Florida, crazy expensive. So I thought I had a place to go the day after Christmas. And then they pulled it out from under me two days before that

because I was only going to sign a four months lease until May. And they said, oh, we found somebody who's going to sign a years lease. So we're giving it to them. So that got ripped out from under me. Jenny had spent her whole life taking care of herself, raising her family, building her own business. And now, heading into her retirement years, she found herself completely relying on others

for the most basic needs. It felt like rock bottom. Then she thought of everyone else who had signed up for the life at sea cruise with her, many of whom were in the same boat as her, pun not intended. So she got an idea and she decided to present it to her fellow future cruisers in their whatsapp group. She said, hey like I'm desperate I have no money I have nowhere to live you, my income is next to nothing. I've heard Ecuador's really cheap.

Would anyone be interested in renting a house in Ecuador with me for four months? And actually a couple people chimed in, so that's what I did. And with two people, it was affordable, not by myself. But since someone else said, yeah, I'll go with you, because they were in literally the same, we were all'll go with you. Cause they were in literally the same, we were all in the same position. Things finally started looking up for Jenny in Ecuador. She was living the kind of retired life

that she'd imagined all along. Living in a quiet remote village by the sea, hang out with friends, eating freshly caught fish. I walked to the beach and I exercised and just got myself in really great shape for this cruise and was in a good frame of mind mentally to get ready for that. And then around April 2024, she got word from the Villavi. The ship was going to be ready to sail in just a couple weeks.

Her dream was finally in reach. So we all flew over to Southampton to get on this ship May 15th. And they had let us know right before that trip that now that ship was going to be delayed. The delay is only supposed to be for a couple days, but you all know how this part plays out already. A couple days becomes a couple weeks. And then the ship needs repairs, so it's moved to a port in Belfast, Ireland, and everyone flies to Belfast. But Belfast is way more expensive

and everyone is already financially overextended. So the Villavi is like, don't worry about it. If you guys front the cost of room and board, we'll reimburse you for expenses up to $200 a day, which everyone quickly realizes it's pretty hard to find a last minute hotel room in Europe in the summer on a budget. Adding to the chaos was the residents kept getting these emails saying, the boat will be ready soon,

come on over, and then just kidding, another delay. And besides just the delays of the ship, they kept removing amenities. You know, like the first big one they removed was all the inside cabins, which I had booked, were supposed to have virtual windows. So if you're in an inside cabin, it would be just as though I was looking out the window as though I had a window in my cabin and I'm looking out and I can see the ocean or if we come into port I would see I would see whatever anybody sees if they actually had a window they're like well you know the ship really isn't equipped for that it's going to cost a lot to run

all the electric and get all these features so you're not going to have a virtual window so you're not gonna have a virtual window. Just like that. And then they came for the food. The Villa V Odyssey was supposed to have three restaurants. Three free restaurants, included with the cost of their tickets. But then they told passengers, wait, actually one of those is gonna be an upcharge restaurant,

so you'll have to pay extra for that. And two of the restaurants won't actually be ready when you get on board, but we're working on it. Oh, and remember how we said there'd be a culinary kitchen on board so you could cook yourself? Actually, that's not happening either. Oh, and then I had very carefully picked out the cabin I wanted, which was in a really midship, very quiet area on a floor that actually nobody wanted because I didn't want people walking by my door going to the restaurants 24 hours a

day. So I picked a really quiet spot. Well, then, oh, well, that entire floor is not going to be available. Because the crew has to stay on that floor because there's problems with the crew quarters. So they gave us plenty to complain about. Jenny was getting very frustrated. Not only was she living day by day, struggling to find reasonably priced hotel rooms throughout Europe, paying for accommodations

and food out of her own pocket when she was supposed to be on an all-inclusive cruise, now that cruise which she'd spent so much of her life savings on was turning out to be not at all what they'd advertised. So she did the thing that we all do when we're frustrated. She opened up her group chat. By this point, Jenny was part of like 10 WhatsApp chat rooms with future cruisers. The folks in Belfast, the Canary Island expats, even a group discussing

salons and spas at each port. These were friendships she'd been cultivating for almost a year and a half now. And everybody was annoyed and everybody was irritated and you know, so we're all kind of venting on these WhatsApp chats, which were private chats that were just the residents. There was nobody from Villavi owners, management, nobody. This was our own personal chat room. There was another group chat on another app, one that was monitored by the official Villavi team.

And that's where they all got status updates and asked questions about the ship. But we were all well aware anything in that chat room was in the face of the Villavi management. You know, so it wasn't where you would go complain. It was in the official Villavi chat that they got word around July of last year that the ship was ready. Not ready to take off. That would be crazy.

They still had a ways to go before all the repairs were done to actually set sail. But they had gotten approval to let people onto the ship. So at least the passengers wouldn't have to pay for hotel rooms anymore. Now at this point, Jenny had been camped out at the Canary Islands because it was cheaper and warmer. So when she heard the ship might be ready, she booked a flight. So I fly from the Canary Islands back to Belfast. I arrive at like one in the morning. I found myself actually in a student dorm. Couldn't afford the hotel rooms, but I did find this fabulous student dorm when the students were out in the summer, they rent the dorms out to just travelers. And so I wake up the next

morning and I'm having my coffee and the first thing I do in the morning is go to the WhatsApp groups to check and see what's happening, you know, catch up on the latest of what our news is on that day. And I hadn't been online for almost 48 hours because I was traveling and had no internet. So it had just blown up. I saw, I don't know, a couple hundred new messages. And whenever you saw a big number of new messages, you knew something big had happened. Jenny was prepared for another delay, another location change, another bucket list item that had dropped off the itinerary.

She was not prepared for what happened next. That's after the break. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Vincentomi Frey. I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Alex Schwartz. And we are Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. Guys, what do we do on the show every week? We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out. That's right.

We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a book, maybe it's just kind of a trend that we see floating in the ether. And we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template. We talked about the midlife crisis, starting with a new book by Miranda July. But then we kind of ended up talking about Dante's Inferno.

You know, we talked about Kate Middleton, her so-called disappearance. And from that, we moved into right-wing conspiracy theories. Alex basically promised to explain to me why everybody likes The Beatles. You know, we've also noticed that advice is everywhere. Advice columns, advice giving, and we kind of want to look at why.

Join us on Critics at Large from The New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the show. So we left off just as Jenny had landed in Belfast for like the second time, third time. I don't know, I've lost track. But the Villavie said the ship was ready for passengers to board in the coming days. So Jenny had flown in the night before, and in the morning she woke up and checked WhatsApp for updates. And that's when she found hundreds of new messages, which was odd.

So I start reading through these and catching up and it was just, I don't know, some other argument about mattresses. They said everybody would get new mattresses and then apparently they were saying, oh well sorry we can't replace all the mattresses. I remember it was something to do with mattresses. And I was just starting to read through these messages that I had nothing to do with, hadn't even participated in that conversation. And then all of a sudden, the WhatsApp group I was in,

it says, you've been removed from this group. And I'm like, what's that about? You know, I didn't do anything. I was just reading messages. I hadn't even responded to anything. And I knew the guy who was the admin of that group. So I sent him a private, you know, text message and said, hey, you know, you must have hit a wrong button or something that says I've been removed from the WhatsApp group.

And then I didn't hear back from him right away. So then I went to a different WhatsApp group because we had probably 10 of them. And it said I had been removed from that group. And then I checked like all the WhatsApp groups and it said I was removed from the WhatsApp groups. Eventually, she says one of the admins got back to her with this cryptic message telling her to check her email. And sure enough, when she goes to her inbox, she has an email from Kathy Villalba, the

chief operating officer of the Villa Vie. She is also Mike Pedersen's wife. The email says, we regret to inform you that your contract with the Villa Vie residences has been cancelled. The first reason they gave was that Jenny had cancelled the first two segments of her trip that were supposed to travel around Europe, which, you know, that part never happened because of all the delays. But the second reason was that they said they had gotten a dozen formal complaints from

residents about Jenny's complaining and negativity. It said I was creating a negative atmosphere for someone I don't even know for who. Had you been posting outside of the WhatsApp groups? Any criticism? No, no, no, nothing. I had posted nothing on social media, nothing Facebook, nothing outside of the private WhatsApp group. Do you think someone ratted on you or do you think that there was someone from Villavie inside? The problem is kind of from day one with the whole the way they set up that company. It wasn't just like a cruise ship where everybody pays their fare and gets on and you're all kind of equal.

There were some people that were actually they called them founders, which is their word for investors like from day one when he had the concept after he split from life at sea. The people that he was close to that decided to go with him at that point, you know, he had to raise money to start this new company. So he raised money by getting these investors who were also basically almost all of them were gonna be residents on

the ship also. So this group of founders is kind of like the VIP group on the ship. So they're protective of it. Very. And they're literally invested in this company. Right. They were super sensitive to anything that somebody wasn't happy about, that someone in their opinion,

what they would call complaining about. And a lot of those people were in the WhatsApp group. So those people were aware of things that were being said. And I don't have absolute proof, but I'm pretty certain of at least a couple of the people I know that were probably screenshotting a lot of things, not just with me and running to Kathy and Mike, like a pet student at a school,

running to the teacher and ratting someone out and saying, this person is unhappy with this. Whatever happened, the impact was the same. Jenny was stunned. She thought she was speaking amongst friends, friends she'd been in touch with for years at this point. Plus, everyone was venting in these chats. There was a lot to vent about. She had no idea why she'd been singled out. So Jenny went back to read the receipts, and she found one comment that stuck out. After the Villavi announced they were taking yet another promised amenity away,

Jenny had written to the WhatsApp group. And I said, you know, hey, would there happen to be any lawyers in this group? Cause I didn't know what most people's professions were. I'd never met them. I said, why just feel like when we signed a contract and you're expecting X, Y, and Z, and then they take it all away and they still want you to pay the same amount of money, but they took away all of these things you were supposed to get, including a lot of the free food and

stuff like this. Now, they changed so many things. So I started asking, I said, is this legal? I said, I'm not a legal person, but just common sense is telling me there's no way this can be legal. How can they keep taking away things from us? It seems like a perfectly reasonable question, especially for a trip that was explicitly billed as offering all these amenities for one fixed price.

But as far as Jenny can remember, that was the last question she got to ask the group. After her contract was canceled, Jenny didn't know what to do. Neither did the other residents. When they heard that two of the passengers wouldn't be allowed on the boat, a group of them got together and tried pushing back on the decision. Now, to me wrong person to eliminate. So then they just left us there. And then a bunch of the residents got together,

we had 25 signatures on a letter that was within 24 hours, it was submitted to the company with all the people saying we don't think this is right We don't want these people thrown off the ship like that. You can't do this. There's no legal basis for this So we basically begged and pleaded and tried to negotiate with the company for a couple of weeks Jenny sent us this letter. It was signed by 18 Villa V residents. First and foremost, they were asking Cathy and Mike to reconsider letting Jenny back on the boat. They said the last few months had been uncertain and she had a

right to speak her mind. In fact, it goes on to argue that they all have a right to speak their minds, that they shouldn't be watching everything they say for fear of being kicked off the ship. But the V of V team wouldn't budge. Kathy told Jenny that all the founders had taken a vote and still wanted her off. So she headed back to the States where she actually did get a lawyer and she sued, arguing that the company had canceled her contract without valid grounds to do so, that they'd falsely represented what the cruise was going to be

and that they owed her money, lots of it. And because of everything she'd been through waiting to get on the ship, she really needed the money. Although my condo was opening up, I can't afford to live in my own condo anymore because I gave up one of my businesses which was set up for retirement. And since between Life at Sea and Villavi has not returned a big chunk of my money,

they returned a portion of it. And I had left a couple of suitcases on the ship. The termination letter basically says, you know, we'll refund your money and send your belongings back. They did none of that. I had to beg and beg and beg for months, email after email, took an attorney to get my possessions back from the ship because they weren't even going to send those. Eventually, Jenny did get her stuff back, but it's been almost a year since the villa V terminated her contract and she's still waiting on the rest of the money And how much money are you out between life at sea and villa V? Oh

Well because with villa V I have the money they haven't returned and all of my expenses which of course I was never on the ship to get on board credits so You know thousands of course I was never on the ship to get on board credits. So, you know, thousands of dollars I spent. So probably, I'm gonna say 70 to 80,000 with all my expenses between the two companies. But yeah, it's a long list of damages. It's, you know, emotional damages, physical damages, oh, and fraud for everything, you know, you're going to get all this and oh, no, you're not. So fraud and deception and sales practices, actually, the financial is a very small part

of it, you know. Jenny's lawsuit requests nearly $200,000 in damages. But like she said, that's just a small part of it. The bigger part is the emotional toll it's taken on her. The lawsuit specifically mentions the extreme anxiety and depression that Jenny suffered as a result of this, as a result of moving out of her apartment, liquidating her business, couchsurfing, hotel hopping, never knowing what her next week or month might look like. And then not even being able to live out the dream

that she'd envisioned for so many months. But there's one more element of Jenny's lawsuit that I think is important. You see, when Jenny was kicked off the boat, it wasn't just her that was shocked. Some of her future cruisers were shocked too. And so was the press. The failures of both the Villavie and Life at Sea have been covered by CNN, the Telegraph, the New York Post. So when Jenny took her story to them, the

Villavie folks were also asked for their statement. And Mike Pedersen told the Telegraph that Jenny had broken multiple terms and conditions, including by speaking to the press, since she'd signed a nondisclosure agreement. Jennie also alleges the Villavi team threatened to sue her for breaching the NDA. But the thing is, on Jennie's original contract, which is attached to the lawsuit and available to the public, there is no nondisclosure agreement or confidentiality clause. Where there is a confidentiality clause is on the Villaville website under terms and conditions.

Jenny and her lawyer argued that those terms were added after she signed the contract without her consent, which would therefore mean she's not legally bound by them because any changes to an existing contract have to be agreed to by both parties. By pointing this out, Jenny is both defending her right to speak up in court, to speak to us in the media, and also letting us know that everyone on the boat right now is subject to this confidentiality clause, whether it's legal or not. Because they've seen what happens when someone from Villavi even just believes that confidentiality clause has been broken. What they wanted to do by terminating two women was to put the fear of God in everybody so that nobody will complain.

And it worked. So although I have friends personally that will send me private, you know, just me and them, you know, send me a text or something and say, hey, this just happened. They can't even say it publicly. It's just so sad. Shouldn't be legal, but I'm gonna do whatever I can to fix that. The whole cruise is just a mess. So I can't say I'm sorry I'm not on it. I'm sorry I'm not with my friends,

but I'm not sorry I'm not on that ship. But the drama continues. As long as that ship is moving, the drama is going to continue. And that's where Joe Rhodes is probably the most vocal. But he still doesn't divulge a lot of things. Because obviously, like me, he doesn't want to be thrown off the ship. So it is a continuing saga. And I really wish that all of the information

could be published out there. I feel bad for the people that just see the good YouTubers, we call them the cheerleaders, that are just putting out the great information because they're getting a kickback from Villavi. And some naive person sees that and signs up and then gets on and realizes it's nothing like that. You know, that's who I feel bad for at this point.

So hopefully with my lawsuit, we can do something to get the information out and protect these people. For now, Jenny's back home in Florida. She doesn't have the money to be renting out her own condo, so she's living in a camper van, waiting for the dust and her lawsuit to settle. If things change, you know, if I can get my money refunded or get back out of this, you know, get anything back from either one of these companies with the lawsuits I might be able to afford to live in my own condo again So right now I'm a van lifer as for us. We're gonna continue reporting on the Villavi residences

We reached out to Mike Pederson offering him the chance to tell his side of the story and he wouldn't comment on the lawsuit with Jenny But he did say that things changed over the course of his planning the Villavi Odyssey trip. That initially, when he first started marketing the cruise, he hadn't even secured a ship. And once he did secure the Odyssey, the offerings were updated. As of this recording, Mike has tentatively agreed to talk to us. But who knows? When it comes to the Villavi, it seems like the tides are constantly shifting. So while we're hoping for the best, we're planning for, you know, other outcomes. And with that in mind, I want to wrap this up by saying if anyone else wants to talk, either on the record or off,

we're here. Just send us a message at hyperfixpod at gmail.com. And on next week's premium episode, we'll have another check-in with Joe Rhodes. Hope you'll join us there. This episode of Hyperfix was produced by Emma Cortland, Amore Yates, and Sarisovar Sukenek. It was hosted by me, Alex Goldman. The music is by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, and me. The show is engineered by Tony Williams.

Fact-checking by Sona Avakian. You can get bonus episodes, join our Discord, and much more at hyperfixpod.com slash join. And I think we've made a pretty compelling case for it. We've got more Joe Rhodes stuff coming that way. We managed to get an interview with the folks at Villa V. It's probably gonna end up over there. You should check it out. Again, that's hyperfixpod.com slash join.

Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at radiotopia.com. Thanks so much for listening. See you soon.