Thank you everyone for your responses.
I was a bit thrown off by the timestamp value the first time I printed it
by how small it was.
The revelation that postgres TimestampTz uses an epoch (time zero) of
2000-01-01 helped clarify
that value would indeed be smaller than regular UNIX epoch.
In my case I was trying to convert a diff of two timestamps into epoch
seconds which explains why the value
was just 1.5hr. My issue is now resolved.
Thanks again
- Sushrut