Back in the day I used to listen to KFI from El Paso TX, In the daytime!
I was using an amateur radio to receive the signal.
Then some lousy Mexican station popped up on 640 :-(
I made a rotatable loaded dipole and after that I could still hear it OK if I rotated it to null the Mex station.
Nowadays you can listen to most good AM stations on the internet.
I’d listen to Dennis Miller if I could find him on a station that didn’t block listening on line.
Yep, even a basic older smartphone should allow you to stream from a webpage, right?
What if you’d used high gain yagii beamed towards SoCal, would that made difference?