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
