Certainly, whether or not someone is initiating a pissing contest by asking you how many TSS, or hours, or km, or miles, or wombat sightings, or whatever other quantitative measure comes first to their mind depends on their tone of voice, your relationship to them, and the circumstances. It’s usually just the way cyclists start training small talk.
Personally, I look at hours as a motivator – the last three decades have taught me that my performance directly correlates with how many easy endurance minutes I can add to the time spent in zones 5 or 4, depending on the time of year. I repeat my first coach’s words “the more contractions, the more reactions” to nudge myself though a few more minutes on those endurance days.
But, it’s about what makes you happy. Ideally, you just like riding your bike and training as intrinsic goods. Some folks are going to want to establish hierarchies as a means of feeling better about their position in the cycling world, or in the world at large, or about the emotional baggage they carry with them that drives them through an endurance sport (there are a lot of very motivated athletes who are probably not very healthy people – my own propensity for responding to honked horns with a middle finger puts me in that group), and hopefully we all grow out of whatever bit of that we have in us.
But, to put it back into a training perspective, if you can do higher volume, you should – yes, TSS is a valuable metric, but as Nate and Chad have noted on the podcast to get closer to your genetic potential, you have to do the volume (which, of course, doesn’t mean you have to brag about it).