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Chris Kirkpatrick is opening up about the meme swaps in his group chat with fellow *NSYNC members.
While chatting with PEOPLE, Kirkpatrick, 54, admits he and his former bandmates — Justin Timberlake, 44, Joey Fatone, 48, JC Chasez, 49, and Lance Bass, 46 — often reminisce on their early days as a group, saying, “We all talk about it, especially when we’re back together or I see the guys.”
“I’ve seen them each a few times this year so far and got to hang out and we talk and we always send stupid memes or whatever,” Kirkpatrick says. “When people are making fun of us, that’s one of the first things that goes up on our little chat, like, ‘Have you seen this one yet?’ ”
“There’s definitely, there’s a group chat, there’s a me and JC chat, there’s a me and Lance chat, there’s a me and Joey chat.”
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Sometimes, the memes are related to the band, though other times, Kirkpatrick says they’re just “random.”
“Sometimes it’s like other random memes or sometimes, it’s memes that remind us of each other and we kind of send them and it’s fun that we still have that banter with each other — it’s just like no time’s ever, you know, gone on,” Kirkpatrick — who is married to Karly Skladany and has an 8-year-old son named Nash Dylan — says.
Kirkpatrick spoke to PEOPLE ahead of his Pop 2000 tour — which featured 2000s superstars, like Brad Fischetti from LFO, O-Town, BBMak and Ryan Cabrera — as part of LadyGang’s LadyWorld retreat in Florida last month.
The event brought together many of the early aughts boy bands that Kirkpatrick performed with back in the day.
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“BBMak opened up for us. … And funny enough, LFO, we did a few things over in Europe with them. The main draw of Pop 2000 is usually O-Town, and we never really did anything with O-Town back in the day because they were kind of after us,” he says. “But we were friends and I actually used to live right down the street from them, so you know, I have a lot of stories just hanging out with them.”
Kirkpatrick teased that the performance would hearken back to the glory days of MTV.
“I host it so, you know, I kind of banter with the crowd, it’s kind of like the old MTV days — kind of like Total Request Live, where we have all these different bands that were big in the late ’90s, early 2000s,” he says. “It’s like all these bands jump on, do their songs, and then you move on to sometimes a different genre, sometimes a similar genre. But it basically just, you know, hearkens back to the old TRL days.”
“I’m kind of like Carson Daly [but I] actually come out and sing, too. I do perform,” he continues.
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Kirkpatrick also took a few friendly shots at Chasez after the *NSYNC member joked on an episode of the LadyGang podcast that Kirkpatrick would “need some knee cream” and “aspirin” before his performance.
“We’re different folks these days,” Chasez joked with hosts Keltie Knight, Becca Tobin and Jac Vanek at the time.
Asked to respond to the dig, Kirkpatrick jokingly replies, “Well, first of all, the difference is I’m still out there doing it and he’s not.”
“It’s one of those things where it’s like, my body probably hurts way more than his does, but since I’ve been doing it more, I’m out there all the time, you know, I’ve got a regimen now,” he says. “I know how to take care of myself. I know how to handle, you know, the dancing, the singing, all that stuff. So it’s a little different, man.”
Kirkpatrick was quick to add, however, that he wishes Chasez were performing alongside him, saying, “I wish I could get him out with me because he’s one of my favorite singers of all time. It’s tough for me to really dig on him.”
