So here are my basic pyramids for the lesson. As I was doing this I had gotten really confused at first because my pyramid was not turning out the same way as in the lesson. After looking through the forums I realized it was because I had immediately went into edit mode and sized mine up from there so when I went to Inset by .1 I got a really small step.
I've noticed that in the lessons that sometimes the models are changed in object mode. This is something I had learned to avoid as it shifts around the origin and sizes and when importing to game engines it does weird things. Basically, you want the origin at 0,0,0 and sizes to all be at 1,1,1 in object mode. So I did a test. the first pyramid is the one done as per the lesson by sizing the base while in object mode and then inseting by .1. as you can tell when it is selected in object mode it is 10,10,1. The second pyramid is the one sized up to 10,10 in edit mode so it still retains the 1,1,1 in object mode and inset by 1 each time. As far as I can tell they are identical.
My question is why? perhaps I had learned wrong and it doesn't really matter when importing that the mesh remains at 1,1,1? I'm aware that you can normalize the size down to 1,1,1 but it still seems a lot easier to keep the base at 1,1,1 and then all blender units would retain the same proportion. It seems like it would be better for modeling in general and you would avoid problems later down the road.